HISTORY OF CANCER QUACKERY.

Abstract

When I was a young man in Indianapolis, Indiana, I lived near a park on the borders ofwhich was a house occupied at that time, about 1906, by a cancer quackery headed by Leon P. Leach. Leach was a member ofa cancer quack iâmily which included his father-in-law, William O. Bye, and his two brothers-in-law, who had operated similar establishments in Kansas City. Their quackery included essentially the use of an arsenic paste designed to burn offsuperficial cancers and a number ofworthless internal remedies. Usually on a pleasant day the benches in the park were filled with people whose faces and jaws were covered with bloody bandages. Most of these people had come from great distances for treatment. When I came to the offices ofthe American Medical Association in 1913 I found the Bureau of Investigation—then called the Propaganda Department—under the direction of Dr. Arthur J. Cramp. He had been accumulating for some time the records ofvarious charlatans in the field of cancer; later much of this collection was published in a pamphlet called Cancer Cures and Treatment. The advertisements of the cancer charla-