Quackery Unmasked: or, A Consideration of the Most Prominent Empirical Schemes of the Present Time, with an Enumeration of Some of the Causes Which Contribute to Their Support.
334 pp. 8vo. Hoolihan 2132: "An 1814 Yale medical graduate, King practiced medicine in Rhode Island until 1848, and in Massachusetts until his retirement in 1859. Although unsuccessful as a businessman (cloth manufacturing), King served in the Rhode Island General Assembly and was an outspoken advocate of the suffrage and abolition movements. In 1852 he was awarded an honorary M.D. by the Berkshire Medical Institution. Quackery Unmasked... while in the main an indictment of homeopathy, was also an eloquent plea for higher standards of medical education. Although King devotes half the book to homeopathy, Quackery Unmasked addresses the gamut of alternative therapies available to Americans at mid-century, i.e., hydropathy, Thomsonism, Indian medicine, eclecticism, chrono-thermalism and natural bone-setters. He attributes the proliferation of these schools to newspaper advertising ('the American press is under no legal or moral restraint, and is ever ready for money, to aid impostors in deceiving and defrauding the public,' p. 251), 'female influence' ('the husband rarely meddles with medical matters in his own family,' p. 263), discord within the medical profession, and clerical influence ('instead of leading men to the fountain of living waters... they direct them to the wet sheet or shower bath of Priessnitz,' p. 275)."
