Profs & Pints Alameda: A History of Mythical Cures

Profs and Pints Alameda presents: “A History of Mythical Cures,” on America’s longstanding tradition of selling false remedies in pursuit of fortune, with Vivian Delchamps Wolf, assistant professor of English at Dominican University of California and scholar of the portrayal of disability in literature.

What drives the desire for a cure-all? Who benefits from that desire?

Explore tough questions related to our quests for cures with Vivian Delchamps Wolf, a scholar of disability studies, feminist studies, and race studies whose upcoming book Resisting Diagnosis examines how women’s disability literature of the nineteenth century altered notions of health and drove social change.

She’ll trace the advocacy of mythical cures in the United States from the 19th century to today, unpacking how such cures were promoted in ways that reinforced eugenic beliefs and biases related to gender, ability, and race.

She’ll describe how nineteenth-century medical authorities promised cures to capitalize off those seeking their care. You’ll learn about health spa owners who paid doctors to send them patients, sustaining the myth of the “water cure” that boosted California’s health tourism. We’ll look at how the “rest cure” was prescribed to women diagnosed with “hysteria” to force them into isolation. Women’s writings gave accounts of their desperation being exploited by male doctors who exerted control by prescribing “cures” that actually worsened symptoms, necessitating further care.

We’ll consider the traveling medicine shows popularized in the West after the Civil War, examining how these performances involved music and aggressive rhetoric promoting “exotic” cure-alls such as snake oil. You’ll learn how white salesmen, in purporting to source ingredients from Native American and Chinese medicine, promoted harmful racial stereotypes for their own financial gain. 

Dr. Wolf will explore how curative and eugenic rhetoric persists in today’s wellness trends such as the promotion of “detoxifying” teas.

In discussing the racialized and financial politics of medicine, she’ll offer a disability-centered perspective that challenges the assumption that bodies and minds need to be “fixed.” She’ll familiarize her audience with disability advocates who challenge the rhetoric surrounding “cures” and urge us to envision a future in which we seek to care for people rather than fix them. (Tickets available only online. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Old bottles for bogus medicines on display at a Tulsa Fair. (Photo by Wesley Fryer / Creative Commons.)

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