Dr. Albert Abrams and Other "Quacks"


5 Top Quacks in Medical History

1. Josef Mengele 1911-1979
The "Angel of Death" at Auschwitz, Mengele's crimes against humanity during World War II at the concentration camp are well-documented and well-known. Some of the more notable and horrendous "experiments" he carried out were: injecting dyes into children's eyes to see if eye color could be changed; attempting to measure how much force would be needed to break a human being's skull (while living, of course); putting Jewish prisoners in a gigantic oven and testing how long it would take for human flesh to sustain first-, second-, and third-degree burns; sewing twins together to see if he could create conjoined twins; and rubbed ground glass into injuries to see what the effect would be.

2. Walter Freeman 1895-1972
A prominent neurologist and psychiatrist, he popularized the lobotomy by making it easy and convenient: "perfecting" the transorbital lobotomy, where a sharp implement (the first was an icepick from his own kitchen) was inserted through the inside corner of the eye, tapped with a small hammer until it broke through the skull bone and entered the frontal lobe of the patient's brain, then wiggled around like a stir-stick to cut neural connections.

3. John R. Brinkley 1885-1942
The "goat gland" doctor, Brinkley performed hundreds of surgeries on men who feared that their most virile days were behind them by opening up their scrotal sacs and nestling goat's testicles alongside the men's. There was no arterial conjoining, no grafting, no fusion - the goat gland and human testicle merely occupied the same sac, but Brinkley claimed that the extra flow of testosterone would revitalize a male patient's sex life.

4. John Harvey Kellogg 1852-1943
His sanitarium in Battle Creek drew large numbers of "patients" who apparently volunteered for such masochistic treatments as: complete abstinence from any sexual activity, since it was the source of most illness; yogurt enemas to cleanse the body; marching while eating meals to help digestion; carbolic acid applications to the clitoris to prevent female masturbation; and immersion in freezing water laced with radium.

5. William J.A. Bailey 1884-1949
President of "Radium Company" of New York and a self-proclaimed doctor who never received his medical degree, he prescribed to his patients "Radithor", essentially a solution of radium in regular water, which he asserted would help invigorate tired patients.His most notable patient was Eben Byers, a wealthy industrialist, who drank 1400 bottles of Radithor before having his jaw fall off and subsequently dying from radiation poisoning.