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How long does it take to read Quackery?

A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything

Lydia Kang, Nate Pedersen

Quackery by Lydia Kang, Nate Pedersen takes about 6 hours 18 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 6 hours 18 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2017. 344 pages, about 94,600 words.

13 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 10 hours 31 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 6 hours 18 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 57 minutes

The page count is the median across 6 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

"What won't we try in our quest for perfect health, beauty, and the fountain of youth? Well, just imagine a time when doctors prescribed morphine for crying infants. When liquefied gold was touted as immortality in a glass. And when strychnine--yes, that strychnine, the one used in rat poison--was dosed like Viagra. Looking back with fascination, horror, and not a little dash of dark, knowing humor, Quackery recounts the lively, at times unbelievable, history of medical misfires and malpractices. Ranging from the merely weird to the outright dangerous, here are dozens of outlandish, morbidly hilarious "treatments"--conceived by doctors and scientists, by spiritualists and snake oil salesmen (yes, they literally tried to sell snake oil)--that were predicated on a range of cluelessness, trial and error, and straight-up scams. With vintage illustrations, photographs, and advertisements throughout, Quackery seamlessly combines macabre humor with science and storytelling to reveal an important and disturbing side of the ever-evolving field of medicine"--

Subjects: Medicine, Quacks and quackery, History, X-Men (Fictitious characters), Comic books, strips, Medicine, history

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