Medicine: Cancer Quacks

Although U.S. doctors have long known about the damage done by quack cancer cures, they often lack specific clinical evidence to back them up. At a meeting of the International College of Surgeons in Washington last week, Dr. Charles E. Horton of Duke University Hospital produced a sizable body of evidence: 64 case histories of men and women who had first gone to backwoods cancer quacks and then, uncured, had gone on to Duke.

Practice & Preaching. Of the 64 patients, reported Dr. Horton, ten probably never had cancer, 27 had cancer but suffered...