A quack on trial: Advertising and education in Missouri's medical marketplace, 1850-1890

This study compares the lives and practices of Dr. Galen Bishop (1824-1902) and Dr. George Catlett (1828-1886), physicians emblematic of a larger struggle to shape the future of medical practice in America. The orthodox Catlett was among the best-educated physicians in St. Joseph, Mo., and he utilized membership in local and national professional organizations to gain lucrative appointments. In contrast, the apprentice-educated Galen Bishop was a successful heterodox physician who utilized advertising to attract patients from across the state.;Both professional association membership and entrepreneurial advertising were strategic reactions to an increasingly competitive market economy for medical services. Examining physician newspaper advertisements offers insight into the clashing American health cultures of the 1870s. From the orthodox perspective, advertisements were vulgar and unbecoming of medicine as a gentlemen's pursuit; they instigated an unseemly competition for patients that debased the medical profession. These deleterious effects led medical associations to create a Code of Medical Ethics that severely restricted the use of advertising. This prohibition did not curtail advertising practices outside of association members, but the code's rules succeeded in ossifying distinctions between the medical orthodox and their heterodox competitors.;It would be a mistake, though, to accept that the purported orthodox / heterodox divide accurately sorted the "physicians" from "quacks." Charismatic physicians like Galen Bishop struggled with their organizational minded counterparts, like George Catlett, over the ethical soul of American medicine. Should medicine be an exclusive, well-regulated, morally certified gentlemen's practice? Or, should physicians make use of market forces like advertising to compete for patients by highlighting their therapeutic skills? Advertising with abandon and subscribing to esoteric proprietary medical practices, Dr. Bishop was exactly the quack that the medical associations sought to suppress. His success was a grave threat to the medical establishment's efforts to cast heterodox physicians as dangerous quacks that operated outside the bounds of decency. Ultimately, Galen Bishop's career illustrated that holding certain quack beliefs - advertising them, even - was not mutually exclusive with the successful practice of medicine.