FRIDAY SURPRISE: If it quacks like a duck, it might not be a duck.

An acquaintance of mine once experienced a burglary of his house. They got away with some valuable items, but I wondered just how the thieves were planning to profit from them. They couldn't pawn them, and if they tried to sell them on the street they'd be laughed to the curb. I couldn't imagine a thief stupid enough to steal this guy's stuff.

You see, this acquaintance was an electrical engineer who collected weird pseudo-medical devices. He'd found a surprising number over the years, and apparently he's not alone - there are a lot of quackery collectors who have put their finds on the net.

One of my favorite items is the The Neu-Vita Oculizer:



From www.americanartifacts.com, it is supposed to fix your eyes so that you no longer need glasses. It has two sets of eye cups; the soft rubber ones use a crank and pulley system to rotate them against your eyes, while the other side carries hard rubber eyecups. They have a concave faced plunger to poke the eye when the rubber bulbs are squeezed, and vacuum can also be applied by covering the air intake hole and releasing the bulb.

Yeah, just what I want to do to my eyes! Anyhow, that's just one of the many places on the net that you can find the history of quackery. (Sadly, most of the sites have designs that seem stuck in the mid-1990s and a surprising lack of decent images.)

One of the best is the Museum of Quackery. Tons of links. (Quackery, as you'll learn, is alive and well in the 21st century!)
Museum of Quack Electrotherapy Instruments.
American Artifacts (neat site; medical quackery is only a part of their collection, and they have items for sale.)

-=[ Grant ]=-