By Martin Gardner
"[Gardner] zaps his pursuits with laserlike precision and wit."—Entertainment Weekly
Martin Gardner might be the wittiest, so much devastating unmasker of medical fraud and highbrow chicanery of our time. right here he muses on themes as various as numerology, New Age anthropology, and the overdue Senator Claiborne Pell's obsession with UFOs, as he mines americans' doubtless inexhaustible urge for food for undesirable technology. Gardner's humorous, brilliantly unsettling exposés of reflexology and urine treatment will be required analyzing for someone attracted to "alternative" drugs. In a global more and more tilted towards superstition, Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? will provide these people who prize common sense and customary feel gigantic solace and thought. "Gardner is a countrywide treasure...I want [this] might be made obligatory studying in each excessive school—and in Congress."—Arthur C. Clarke "Nobody alive has performed greater than Gardner to unfold the certainty and appreciation of arithmetic, and to dispel superstition."— The New Criterion, John Derbyshire
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Extra resources for Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?: Debunking Pseudoscience
Emmanuel König, of Basel, in his ebook The Animal nation (1683), suggested consuming one’s urine to heal heartburn, melancholy, gout, toothaches, colic, jaundice, and excessive fevers. Daniel Bockher, a German health care professional, in 1622 released a well-liked paintings titled Medicus Microcosmos. It praises the therapeutic homes of urine, excrement, lice, sperm, tapeworms, and ear wax. Pierre Fauchard, a Parisian dentist, is taken into account the founding father of sleek dentistry. In 1728 he released Le Chirurgien Dentiste (The healthcare professional Dentist), a vintage textual content translated into English within the Forties. during this paintings he pokes enjoyable at a number of ridiculous treatments for toothache, then proceeds to explain a singular therapy of his personal. I quote from James J. Walsh’s unique treatments: the tale of the remedies that Fail (1923): i've got introduced loads of aid to a couple of sufferers who had approximately all their enamel carious and who subsequently have been frequently laid low with pains and aches … via the next therapy. It involves rinsing out the mouth each morning and likewise night … with a few spoonfuls in their personal urine, simply after it's been handed. … it truly is precise that it isn't very agreeable, other than inasmuch because it brings specific aid. Fouchard is going directly to say that a few of his sufferers who used this therapy instructed him that the urine additionally supplied aid from different illnesses. certainly, “experience has proven that urine of fit people is excellent for alleviating the trials of gout and taking away obstructions of assorted varieties in the course of the physique. ” Robert Boyle (1627–91) was once a very good British scientist most sensible recognized to physicists this present day for “Boyle’s law,” which states that the quantity of a fuel varies inversely with its strain. Thorndike charges the next passages from Boyle’s Works: The clinical virtues of man’s urine, either inwardly given, and outwardly utilized, will require really an entire e-book, than part of an essay, to enumerate and demand on. … I shall now purely upload, that I knew an historic gentlewoman, who being virtually hopeless to get better of divers chronical distempers … was once at size suggested, rather than extra expensive physick, to make her morning draughts of her personal water; by way of which she surprisingly recovered, and is, for aught i do know, nonetheless good. And an analogous treatment isn't really disdained through anyone of serious caliber and wonder, that you simply comprehend; and that too after she had travelled so far as the Spaw for her health’s sake. Urine remedy is most generally used this present day in Hindu folks drugs. William Jarvis, writing within the publication of NCAHF, the nationwide Council opposed to healthiness Fraud (March/April 1995), mentioned that India’s former major minister (1977–79) Morarji Desai on his ninety-ninth birthday, in February 1995, attributed his sturdiness to a relentless ingesting of his personal urine. In 1978, Dan really, on CBS’s 60 mins, interviewed Desai, who spoke at size concerning the nice worth of ingesting urine. Newsweek stated (August 21, 1995) that Mohandas Gandhi was once a urine drinker, yet this was once later denied through India’s Gandhi Institute.