Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science
book · 1957
LINK
SUMMARY
Martin Gardner's classic skeptical survey, fetched directly (HTTP 200) from the Internet Archive OCR full-text download on 7 July 2026. Confirmed passage, quoted verbatim in the bundle: Hauser's following got publicity 'during the same month that the Pure Food and Drug Administration seized copies of his best-seller, Look Younger, Live Longer,' and the government's theory was that in-store displays of the book next to jars of blackstrap molasses constituted, given the book's claims, a 'mislabeling' of the product. A separate passage in the same book (on the Bates method of eye exercises) states: 'The all-time low, however, in books on the Bates system was achieved in 1932 by none other than Gayelord Hauser.' -- corroborating Hauser's authorship of a 1932 book on eyesight without glasses (listed by Wikipedia as Keener Vision Without Glasses, 1932) and the Bates method's standing as medically rejected pseudoscience.
NOTES
Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1952; revised Dover edition 1957) is the archive’s standard citation for mid-century organized skepticism, and it independently corroborates two separate strands of the Hauser case from a contemporary, non-Hauser source: the 1951 FDA seizure of Look Younger, Live Longer over its point-of-sale association with blackstrap molasses (matching, from an outside observer’s account, the federal court record in hauser-molasses-libel-1951-i and -ii), and Hauser’s own 1932 venture into promoting the Bates method of eye exercises as a substitute for corrective glasses, which Gardner singles out as “the all-time low” among the genre’s books. Both passages are quoted verbatim in the bundle; see the verify-quotes block in the grounding log.