Medical cure-alls and scams are nothing new. The
traveling medicine show was a popular way to advertise snake oil and
other quack cures in the 19th century, and then there were radium
treatments
for everything in the early 20th century. Many of us recall copper
bracelets, Laetrile, and other "alternative medicines." There's a long
tradition of getting rich by taking advantage of the gullible. In the
1920s and '30s, these marketers took advantage of a wonderful new medium
to reach consumers: radio.
In 1932, the Federal Radio
Commission (later supplanted by the Federal Communications Commission),
banished from the airwaves fortune-tellers, mystics, seers, and other
people peddling dubious claims, but concern remained about what was fit
to air and how to enforce rules about truth in advertising. A 1936
edition of Hygeia, a publication of the AMA, lamented that “no adequate
and prompt measures are as yet available to curb venal radio stations
from selling ‘time’ to anyone who pays the price.”
And when
regulators did catch up with fraudsters, enterprising quacks got
creative. By setting up towers and transmitters in small towns south of
the United States/Mexico border, a phalanx of fabulists launched their
own stations, beyond the reach of many regulations.
These
Mexican radio stations broadcast with up to a million watts of power,
reaching across the US and beyond. That's how John R. Brinkley
advertised his surgery to implant goat gonads in humans, and made a
fortune. Of course, the marketing of dubious quick cures continues on
the internet. Read about
the era of quack cures on the radio at Atlas Obscura.
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