Pseudoscience and Quackery. Americans have long used these pejorative terms to designate scientific and medical theories and practices for which they have no respect. The meaning of the terms remains contested, however, because one person's “
science” and “
medicine” is often another's “pseudoscience” or “quackery.” Further, the line between pseudo‐science and bad science, between quackery and malpractice, has always been blurry. Thus many late‐twentieth‐century scholars dismissed demarcating between science and pseudoscience as “a pseudo‐problem.”
By the early eighteenth century, the term “quack” (from the Dutch word
quacksalver, meaning one who boasts about his salves) was already gaining currency in the American colonies as a medical synonym for a charlatan. By the early nineteenth century, American physicians, who lacked the protection of strict licensing laws, were complaining that “quacks abound like locusts in Egypt.” Typical of the person they had in mind was the untutored botanical healer Samuel Thomson, who sought wealth and fame by aggressively selling “family rights” to his system. Thomson, who saw himself as a life‐saving reformer, acknowledged that critics called him a quack, but alleged that the real quacks were the regular physicians who gave their patients “poisonous medicines” such as calomel (mercurous chloride).
After 1847, when regular doctors organized the
American Medical Association (AMA), that body led the war on “quackery,” especially targeting dissenting medical groups such as homeopaths, who prescribed infinitesimally small doses of medicine. Ironically, even as the AMA attacked all homeopathy as quackery, educated homeopathic physicians were expelling untrained “quacks” from their ranks.
Around the 1830s, as “science” took on its present‐day meaning, scientific and other writers introduced a new term of opprobrium, “pseudoscience,” to describe such novel ideas as phrenology (the science of “reading” a person's character by examining the skull) and the transmutation of species (later called
evolution). Leaders of American science often contrasted reputable “men of science,” such as themselves, with ignorant and sometimes immoral “quacks” and “charlatans.”
Early in the twentieth century, about the time Congress passed the first Food and Drugs Act regulating patent medicines (1906), the AMA created the first organized anti‐quackery unit in the country. Often collaborating with government agencies, the AMA's Bureau of Investigation sought to suppress “quacks” and “charlatans” who advertised quick cures for
cancer, rheumatism, sexual weakness, or other conditions. By the 1930s the AMA was using “pseudomedicine” as a synonym for quackery.
No species of “quackery” stirred the wrath of organized medicine more than chiropractic, discovered in 1895 by D.D. Palmer, a magnetic healer from Iowa. Palmer believed that sickness resulted primarily from obstructions to the flow of “Innate Intelligence,” which could be relieved by adjustments to the spinal column. Chiropractors described their practice as “the only truly scientific method of healing”; the AMA called it “quackery.” After decades watching chiropractic prosper despite its opposition, the AMA in 1963 created a Committee on Quackery, whose “prime mission” was the containment and elimination of the “unscientific cult” of chiropractic. (The AMA had only recently stopped referring to
optometry as a cult.) The strategy backfired, however; chiropractors in 1976 filed an antitrust suit alleging illegal restraint of trade against a licensed profession, and a decade later won a stunning victory in federal court.
In the later twentieth century, many writers and organizations softened the language they used in discussing healing practices outside the medical mainstream. Inflammatory terms such as quackery and charlatanism gave way to the more neutral “complementary,” “alternative,” or “unconventional” medicine. In part this reflected the immense popularity of heterodox healing, employed by over 40 percent of Americans in the late 1990s. Responding to this widespread use, many medical schools began offering courses on complementary and alternative medicine, and in 1992 Congress created an Office of Alternative Medicine in the
National Institutes of Health.
No such euphemisms replaced “pseudoscience,” which, if anything, increased in usage during the late twentieth century with the rise of watchdog groups such as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal. Although employed most commonly to target ideas marginal to the scientific establishment, such as creation science, Afrocentric science, parapsychology, and “ufology,” (the study of unidentified flying objects), the label pseudoscience also proved useful in besmirching scientific colleagues with whom one strongly disagreed: over racial differences in
intelligence, the links between social behavior and genetic makeup, or claims to have discovered cold nuclear fusion. To the public, the labeling often seemed arbitrary, as when scientists engaging in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) fell within the boundaries of “science,” while those searching for evidence of Intelligence Design were dismissed as “pseudo‐scientists.”
See also
American Association for the Advancement of Science;
Medical Education;
Pure Food and Drug Act.
Bibliography
James Harvey Young , The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation, 1961.
James Harvey Young , The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth‐Century America, 1967.
Norman Gevitz, ed., Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in America, 1988.
Ronald L. Numbers , The Creationists, 1992.
Steven C. Martin , ‘The Only Truly Scientific Method of Healing’: Chiropractic and American Science, 1895–1990, Isis 85 (1994): 207–27.
Ullica Segerstråle , Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond, 2000.
Ronald L. Numbers
