"Cancer cure. Arthritis remedy. Super health food. Diabetes cure. Tuberculosis remedy"--Cover.

Brane-Fude: The first court trial under the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act -- Lawless Centuries: History and stage-setting for health quackery in 20th-century America -- Decade of Enforcement: Valiant efforts, a Supreme Court defeat, and ambiguous help from Congress -- Fraud in the Mails: Enforcement of postal fraud statutes from the late 19th century through the 1920's -- B. & M.: A decade-long effort to prove fraud in court during the golden glow of prosperity -- "Truth in Advertising": Cooperative efforts by the self-regulators and the Federal Trade Commission to restrict the most flagrant abuses of nostrum advertising -- New Muckrakers: The American Medical Association keeps muck-raking currents flowing until the next floodtide: the "guinea pig" school of critics -- New Deal and the New Laws: The hotly contested effort to make federal controls over self-medication drugs more nearly adequate to social need – In Pursuit of the Diminishing Promise: Food and Drug Administration use of the new law to drive false claims from labeling step by step through court interpretation -- Two Gentlemen from Indiana: A diabetes clinic run by two physician-brothers named Kaadt -- Gadget Boom: Device quackery in America, highlighting Ruth B. Drown's Radio Therapeutic Instrument -- Chemotherapeutic Revolution: The way the "wonder drugs" era of prescription medication influenced patterns of self-medication -- Mail-Order "Health": The Post Office Department's contest with medical fraud since the 1930s -- Proprietary Advertising and the Wheeler-Lea Act: The triumphs and failures of the Federal Trade Commission in aiming its 1938 law against abuses in the advertising of self-medication wares -- Medicine Show Impresario: A Louisiana state senator and his medicine show for Hadacol -- "You Are What You Eat": Nutrition nonsense by spielers and door-to-door salesmen: Adolphus Hohensee the main exhibit -- "The Most Heartless" : Cancer quackery, especially the protracted Harry Hoxsey case -- Anti-Quackery, Inc.: A more cohesive effort to combat quackery, prompted by quackery's burgeoning -- Turmoil on the Drug Scene: New frights, a new law, and new awareness of the need for better comprehension of the phenomenon of quackery -- Perennial Proneness: Reflections on the complex motivations that have made mankind so readily susceptible to the quack's appeal.