An Online Museum Of Bad Medicine

Featured Site: The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices

Ladies and gentlemen, hear ye, hear ye! Are you bedridden by the gout? Dropsy? Wet-colic? The staggers? Malarial lameness? Putrid fever?

Then step right up and witness the power of divine healing and miraculous remedies that rest securely on a foundation of primitive science!

See what your ancestors had to choose from to ease what ailed them -- the industrious, creative and utterly wrongheaded health-care techniques that are chronicled at the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices!

Feeling a little under the weather? How about a nice glass of radioactive water? That was a popular curative in 1925.

Prostate trouble? Try a couple of prods from the "prostate gland warmer."

Residents of Minneapolis are familiar with the physical version of this museum, located in the St. Anthony Main area on the banks of the Mississippi. This one-of-a-kind museum is operated by a guy named Bob McCoy (dammit, Jim, I'm a quack historian, not a doctor!). The museum and its Web site exhibit the odd history of ill-advised medicine.

"I'm a professional skeptic," McCoy said in a recent interview.

It all started in 1984 when McCoy mounted an exhibit on phrenology, a pseudoscience from the early 1800s which supposed that a person's character and mental abilities could be determined by feeling the bumps on their heads. McCoy's initial show consisted of a few brain-scanning machines. People would come by to have their heads examined for kicks.

Then one day a woman came in and wanted to borrow one of the mind-meters to go check out the chrome dome of Willard Scott -- who happened to be visiting in St. Paul.

McCoy, naturally, was intoxicated by the power that comes from toying with Willard Scott's brain, and he decided to start the museum. With generous loans from the collections of the American Medical Association, the FDA and the National Council on Health Fraud among others, this quack hall of fame debuted in 1988. The site was launched in 1995 to showcase such fantastic feats of foolery as weight-reducing glasses, the blood-letting "scarificator" and the "recto-rotor" (you don't want to know).

The place looks and feels like your stereotypical Dr. Frankenstein laboratory. With horrific instruments like the "stimulator" -- a gas grill sparker designed to "relieve pain" -- a shoe-fitting X-ray device, and spooky old pieces of torture made of wood, glass and steel, you figure that a good part of modern medicine learned from seeing things done the hard way.

Book Deal

Navigating one's way through the site is as easy as a trip through the alimentary canal. Images from 1800s newspapers are interspersed with pics of the museum and diagrams of the hapless guinea pigs attached to these contraptions.

The hallowed hall of Great American Quacks gives a disturbing glimpse into the altruistic but flawed minds of misfit medicine. Obsessions with electrotherapy, radiation and magnetics tended to make these pseudo-physicians into one-track crackpots, and most of them ended up in prison or destitute.

The museum, though, is as much an ode to the pioneers of the weird as it is to the insane. Why glorify the wacky? The museum's unofficial mission statement reminds us that the land of the free is also the home of the strange:

"Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through the tyranny, that people should be eccentric.
"Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded ... and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time."

John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty," 1859

Not Just A Relic Of The Past

This site makes a good case for some sort of regulation for the medical profession and makes you wonder, who would fall for this stuff?

Ear candles, anyone?

Web Site Of The Week is compiled by Staff Writer David N. Krough, who welcomes suggestions of offbeat and unusual Web sites.

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