Quacks get their day in the sun Quacks get their day in the sun (July 14, 2004)

by Steven Shih

Quack physicians last used leeches more than a century ago, but few come across Dr. Edward Sprague's leech jar without wondering if the dermatologist still relies on blood suckers to treat patients.

A doctor with a leech jar may seem macabre, but Sprague isn't a madman bent on torturing his patients with blood-lettings -- he's more of a 70-year-old medical student obsessed with history's artifacts and lessons.

"I took a medical history class my junior year in med school and found it fascinating," Sprague said.

The Midtown resident began collecting vintage medical books, patent medicine bottles and leech jars from the quackery medicine period of the 19th century after graduating from the University of Miami, Fla. School of Medicine in 1961. The doctor's obsession with quackery artifacts became legendary among those who knew him and soon he had his own network of people aiding his search.

"Actually, my leech jar I got at a garage sale when my friend Bill Wehrend called me and told me about it," Sprague said.

In fact, his friend Wehrend is a curator for the Museum of American Heritage (MOAH) in Palo Alto, which decided to show Sprague's collection of more than 100 objects in their Quack medicine exhibit. The artifacts in the exhibit range from the narcotic (a bottle of Dr. Hobson's Pain Dispeller prominently labeled 50 percent alcohol), to the just plain stupid, (a jug of Wm Radam's "Microbe Killer", a mixture of water and hydrochloric acid).

A medical movement that rose to prominence with the advent of mass advertising, Quackery referred to the fake treatments and curatives of individuals who had more charisma and salesmanship than valid medical knowledge. But while most history books paint quacks as manipulative and malevolently greedy, Sprague sees them in a different light.

"It [quackery] has a lot to say about rapport with your patient," Sprague said. "The quack realizes he must give the patient a lot of attention."

Sprague exhibits a little eccentricity himself, for example his house is filled with antique clocks synchronized to sound in a symphony of chimes. But when it comes to the defense of quackery, his ideas are based on research and experience. He acknowledges quacks were often either charlatans or deluded individuals, like Bishop George Berkeley, a Sprague favorite.

"He thought tar water could cure everything from the flu to cancer," Sprague said.

But quackery has a lot to say about the psychological relationship between the patient which is just as important according to Sprague, who likes to quote from Dr. William Osler, a famous authority on patient care and psychosomatic medicine from the 1800s.

"'He cures most in whom most believe,'" Sprague said. "If you believe in your physician you're more likely to do well or be cured."

In his own practice -- he was a dermatologist at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Redwood City until 1997 -- the good doctor did his best to be more than a drug dispenser to the community and build up their faith and belief. While at Kaiser, Sprague gave public lectures on skin healthcare, quackery, and the patient-physician relationship.

But Sprague's attempts to round out his own practice and build up that belief weren't always appreciated by patients.

"People feel cheated if they don't get some medicine to take," Sprague said.

It is a sentiment, according to Sprague, in keeping with Osler's own judgment that people's predilection for medicating is the real defining difference between mankind and animals. And in this pill-popping, Prozac prescribing nation, it's the reason why Sprague likes to say doctors with their real science "could learn the practice of medicine" from quacks and their weird science.

Sprague's collection of artifacts will be on display at the MOAH until Sept. 26. He will be giving a lecture on quackery at the museum on July 16 at 7:30 p.m.

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