"Strange Medicine" provides a believe-it-or-not journey around the world, exploring the use and misuse of medicinal plants, heavy metals, dyes, and chemicals. The author describes how physicians made their own pills, casts, and elixirs, and cared for their own leeches.
The section on birth defects may cause alarm, though Kienholz quotes statistics showing the small percentage of infants born with the problems described. Her list of known causes of defects, though incomplete, is equivalent to a U.S. surgeon general's warning on cigarettes-in that the pharmaceuticals listed should be...
"Strange Medicine" provides a believe-it-or-not journey around the world, exploring the use and misuse of medicinal plants, heavy metals, dyes, and ch...