Medicine: Quack Quelled

In case anyone ever questioned the American Medical Association's power to quell a quack completely, the Association's Journal last week detailed its handling of Norman Baker. He flourished at Muscatine, Iowa, in a region of many unorthodox Corn Belt medical ideas.* Originally the man was a die-&-tool maker, then a builder of calliopes. Somehow he got into merchandising, sold radios, storage batteries, flour, coffee, canned fruits, silverware, brooms, alarm clocks, overcoats, mattresses, motor car tires, typewriters, paints.

He created a magazine TNT (The Naked Truth) and obtained a license for a broadcasting station KTNT. With these he advertised his wares, scattered his heterodox ideas. Others bought his space and time for advertisements which a more scrupulous businessman would have rejected.

One advertiser had a hocus-pocus "cure" for varicose veins. That led enterprising Mr. Baker into the "cancer-cure" business. Receipts from using the "cures" of two other quacks—Harry M. Hoxsey of Muscatine and Charles O. Ozias of Kansas City—started with $1,380 for October 1929. reached $75,232 for June 1930. But the A. M. A.'s weekly Journal (for doctors) and monthly Hygeia (for everybody) began flaying Quack Baker. His receipts dropped until last January they were only $7,008. He lost the license for his broadcasting station KTNT. Iowa enjoined him from practicing medicine without a license. He sued the A. M. A. for $500,000 damages, charging libel.

A jury of Iowa farmers and merchants agreed that it was no libel to call Norman Baker a quack, gave the A. M. A. another memento mori to wave at other charlatans.