Cases
Every case in the archive.
51 life-extension interventions sold to the wealthy, each running the same
five-stage cycle: charismatic practitioner, exclusive access, vague mechanism, financial
conflict, eventual collapse. Ordered by era.
La vita sobria (Cornaro's sober diet)
A wrecked Venetian nobleman cut his daily ration to twelve ounces of food and fourteen of wine, recovered, and sold the story as a "divine…
Animal magnetism (mesmerism)
From 1778 Mesmer treated the Paris court around his baquet, a tub of magnetized water whose iron rods, he claimed, channelled an invisible…
Egyptian physical regeneration and the Wine of Egypt
Count Cagliostro sold the 1780s aristocracy a forty-day "Egyptian regeneration" and secret elixirs, a vial of "Wine of Egypt" supposedly…
Celestial Bed and Temple of Health
In 1781 James Graham, a Scot who left Edinburgh medical school without a degree, installed a fifty-pound-a-night Celestial Bed at his Pall…
Magnetic somnambulism (artificial somnambulism)
In 1784 the Marquis de Puysegur, a Mesmer initiate, magnetized a young man named Victor Race and watched him sink into a calm, lucid sleep…
Brodum's Restorative Nervous Cordial and Botanical Syrup
In 1802 a masquerade attended by the Prince of Wales staged a mock shop labelled "Doctor Brodum's shop." William Brodum, an itinerant who…
Homeopathy (Hahnemann's system of medicine)
Samuel Hahnemann swallowed cinchona bark while healthy, felt fever-like symptoms, and built a medicine on it: like cures like, and a dose…
Perkins Metallic Tractors
In 1796 the Connecticut physician Elisha Perkins patented two small metal rods of a secret alloy that, drawn across the skin, were said to…
Cordial Balm of Gilead
In 1796 a failed Liverpool tradesman restyled himself "Dr Solomon, M.D." and swore an affidavit that he alone knew the recipe of the…
Macrobiotics (Hufeland's art of prolonging life)
In 1797 Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, royal physician in Berlin and the foremost German doctor of his generation, gave longevity medicine…
Morison's Vegetable Universal Medicine (Hygeian pills)
James Morison, a merchant with no medical training, declared that all disease was impure blood, that purging it cured everything, and that…
The cold-water cure (Gräfenberg hydropathy)
A Silesian farmer's son with no medical training, Vincenz Priessnitz turned cold water into a cure that drew an archduchess, ten princes…
St John Long's Corrosive Liniment and Inhalation
John St John Long, a failed Irish portrait painter, opened a Harley Street practice in 1827 promising to cure consumption by rubbing a…
Grahamism (the Graham system of diet and hygiene)
Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister with no medical training, told 1830s America that meat, spices, alcohol, and even marital sex…
Liebig's Extractum Carnis (LEMCO)
Every jar of Liebig's Extract of Meat carried the signature of the man called the greatest chemist alive, sold as 34 pounds of beef…
Biologic living (the Battle Creek Idea)
John Harvey Kellogg told paying guests at his Battle Creek Sanitarium that the colon was a "seething mass of putrefying food residues"…
Arsenic slimming and complexion nostrums
From roughly 1880 to 1920, arsenic was sold as a beauty aid: a cheap daily wafer, sworn safe, that would melt off surplus flesh and whiten…
The Kuhne friction sitz bath and 'New Science of Healing'
Louis Kuhne, a Leipzig lay healer with no medical degree, taught that all disease is accumulated "foreign matter," cured by sitting in…
Kneipp Cure (hydrotherapy, herbalism, and the 'five pillars')
In 1886, a Bavarian priest published a book claiming that brief cold-water 'shocks' cured or prevented an enormous range of unrelated…
Wm. Radam's Microbe Killer
On jugs lettered "CURES ALL DISEASES," William Radam, an Austin gardener with no medical training, sold a liquid he said killed the…
Lahmann's Physiatric Regimen (dietetic blood-dyscrasia cure)
From 1888 the Dresden physician Heinrich Lahmann sold well-to-do Europeans a single diagnosis for nearly every ailment: a wrong diet…
Brown-Séquard testicular extract (organotherapy)
In June 1889 Charles-Edouard Brown-Sequard, 72 and professor of experimental medicine at the Collège de France, told the Société de…
Spermin-Poehl (Sperminum-Poehl) organotherapy
St. Petersburg court pharmacist Alexander von Poehl isolated a base from semen and bull testes, named it spermin, and sold it in sealed…
J.B.L. ('Joy, Beauty, Life') Cascade internal bath
Charles Alfred Tyrrell sold a rubber bag shaped like a hot-water bottle as the cure for all disease: J.B.L., for "Joy, Beauty, Life,"…
Marine plasma (Sérum de Quinton)
In 1897 René Quinton drained a dog's blood and refilled its veins with diluted seawater; the dog lived, and he declared seawater the…
Fletcherism (thorough mastication)
Horace Fletcher, a wealthy businessman with no medical training, told the world that chewing each mouthful until it liquefied would make…
Physical Culture (Macfadden's drugless system)
Bernarr Macfadden, a publisher with no medical training, sold fasting and drugless living as the cure for every disease, preaching it to…
Order-energy raw-food regimen (Bircher-Benner's 'Lebendige Kraft' nutrition)
From 1904 the Zurich physician Maximilian Bircher-Benner ran a private sanatorium for the King of Siam, the Tsars of Russia, Hermann Hesse…
Bennett's rejuvenation system (muscular contractions and self-massage)
A San Francisco businessman who called himself "the man who grew young at seventy" sold a free regimen of in-bed muscular contractions and…
Soured-milk ('Bulgarian bacillus') longevity therapy
In 1907 the Nobel laureate Elie Metchnikoff told the world the secret of long life was a bowl of soured milk: lactic-acid bacteria would…
The Hazzard Fasting Cure
Linda Burfield Hazzard held a Washington "Fasting Specialist" license with no medical degree, called herself Doctor, and promised that…
Immortal Cell Culture (Carrel's Chick-Heart Experiment)
In 1912 the Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel placed a chick-heart fragment in a flask and declared it proof that cells never die. The press…
Electronic Reactions of Abrams (ERA)
Albert Abrams, a Heidelberg-trained San Francisco physician, claimed a sealed box could diagnose any disease from a drop of dried blood…
Brinkley goat-gland transplantation (goat-to-human gonad implant)
For $750 John R. Brinkley surgically implanted fresh goat gonad tissue into men as a cure for impotence and aging, driving demand through…
The Hay System (food combining / 'food separation')
A surgeon who said medicine could not cure his Bright's disease cured himself by diet, then made that one recovery a single law of all…
Steinach Vasoligation (Steinach Operation)
Eugen Steinach, a Vienna physiologist nominated for the Nobel Prize at least nine times, claimed that tying off one vas deferens would…
Voronoff testicular xenograft (chimpanzee-to-human)
On 12 June 1920 Serge Voronoff sewed slices of chimpanzee testicle under a man's scrotal skin and sold it across Europe as a cure for old…
Overbeck's Rejuvenator
A chemist and brewer with no medical degree, Otto Overbeck patented a battery-and-comb set in 1924, declared that life is electricity you…
I-ON-A-CO
The man who gave Wilshire Boulevard its name sold a coil of wire you plugged into a light socket and wore around your neck. Gaylord…
Radithor
Radithor was distilled water laced with radium, sold by the bottle as "mild radium therapy" to stimulate the glands and cure 150 ailments.…
Hauser's "Wonder Foods" diet (Look Younger, Live Longer)
Gayelord Hauser had no medical degree, yet told his readers his five 'wonder foods' would add measurable youthful years to their lives.…
Cellular therapy (Frischzellentherapie)
In 1931 the Swiss surgeon Paul Niehans injected a dying patient with cells from a freshly killed calf, reported recovery, and opened…
Antireticular cytotoxic serum (ACS / ATsS)
Aleksandr Bogomolets promised his antireticular cytotoxic serum could carry people past a hundred, perhaps to 150. As President of the…
Orgone Energy Accumulator
Wilhelm Reich, a Freud-trained Viennese psychoanalyst, told patients a wooden box lined with steel wool and organic fiber could…
Krebiozen Cancer Treatment
In 1951 Andrew Ivy, a Nuremberg Code co-author and by his own account probably the most famous doctor in the country, announced a secret…
Gerovital H3 (procaine anti-aging therapy)
Ana Aslan took Novocain, a dental anesthetic, and sold it from a Bucharest institute as a cure for aging; foreigners flew in for the…
Megadose vitamin C ('orthomolecular' ascorbate therapy)
In 1970, Nobel laureate Linus Pauling declared that gram-scale doses of vitamin C could stop the common cold; six years later, with a…
Sirtuin-activating compounds (resveratrol, then NMN)
In 2003, Harvard geneticist David Sinclair reported that resveratrol activates a 'longevity gene,' SIRT1 — a finding that became a $720…
Kevin Trudeau Natural Cures infomercial program (2002-2014)
Kevin Trudeau built a television-infomercial empire on the claim that natural, non-drug cures existed for virtually every disease. The FTC…
Blueprint (Project Blueprint)
Bryan Johnson sold his payments company for $800 million, then spent $2 million a year measuring himself, announcing in 2021 a biological…
Therapeutic plasma exchange with intravenous immunoglobulin (TPE-IVIG)
For a fee, a clinic drains and replaces a client's plasma and says it cut their biological age by 2.61 years. The figure comes from one…