Merseyside Skeptics Society
Please note we are at a different venue than usual! The Denbigh Castle is a couple of minutes walk from Moorfields train station right in the heart of Liverpool City Centre. Please see the map below for full details on where to find us Scientific research in medicine has led to many groundbreaking discoveries, from the development of vaccines to the treatment of many previously fatal diseases. Today our chances of surviving serious illness are better than ever, thanks to significant advances in medical knowledge. Yet history is littered with sham doctors, charlatans and quacks peddling bogus medicines and preying on those people desperate for a cure. It is also no coincidence that the ‘Mad Scientist’ trope has remained popular since the most famous iteration in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ – Science itself is not infallible and flawed research can have disastrous consequences, such as Andrew Wakefield’s retracted autism study. In the age of social media and in the wake of COVID-19, the distrust in scientific experts has resulted in a new wave of fake medicines, false information or flawed medical research that is spread at a rapid pace. In this talk, Dr Jenny Lange delves into the history of grifters who capitalised on a lack of medical knowledge, as well as discussing where scientific research has gone wrong. From John R. Brinkley, the bizarre ‘goat-gland doctor’, to more recent fake medicines such as those promoted by the ‘Church of Bleach’, and the disastrous trachea implants developed by Paolo Macchiarini, this talk will examine how easy it is to fall prey to medical misinformation even today.
