Norman G. Baker
Norman G. Baker (27 November 1882 - 8 September 1958) had no medical training of any kind. By 1930 he had used his own radio station, KTNT, together with a promotional magazine he founded called The Naked Truth, to build and advertise the Baker Hospital in Muscatine, Iowa, as a cure for cancer and a wide range of other ailments. Iowa authorities sued him for practicing medicine without a license and the Federal Radio Commission separately moved to revoke KTNT’s broadcast license; both actions succeeded, and the hospital and radio station closed in 1931, though Baker fought on: in 1934 he sued the American Medical Association and two Iowa medical societies, alleging a conspiracy to deprive him of KTNT and the Baker Hospital. In July 1937 he bought the historic Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and reopened it as Baker’s Cancer Curing Hospital, painting much of the building lavender and purple and continuing to sell the same treatment to a new set of patients until a federal jury convicted him of mail fraud in January 1940. He served roughly three years at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, from March 1941 to July 1944, and died in 1958.