Now an example of Medical Quackery, this was one of my favorite pictures
of this professor Wilson's the academics are involved.
Magneto conservative garments.
What I think is really great about this is like all the things that it can cure.
It can cure very important things like nervous prostration, kidney disease,
liver disease, lung trouble, rheumatism, gout stiff joints, paralysis, writer's
cramp, very important, loss of memory and this is really key it can cure giddiness,
because we know the world is going to go to hell with giddiness and varicose veins.
And then of course, if that doesn't really satisfy you,
every other form of disease is covered.
And so even better, it actually price by different pieces.
So we have the throat protector, we have the nerve and the body invigorator.
I think that's there, the body belt.
I'm not sure where that is, maybe that's that.
The sciatic alliance, which scares me.
The knee cap very important, as well as the leg appliance.
Anklets and insoles also available.
So this is very typical of just things that might be out there.
And actually, you can see stuff today that is not quite as quackery oriented but
you'd see things in the back of magazines, even things like the Smithsonian that
sort of like talk about how great things will happen if you just take this other
medication or device, but you have to start somewhere and entrepreneurship has
always been associated with the medical technology market.
So when we go beyond World War II,
we see that NIH acts as a catalyst and private industry takes off.
Recall in our previous modules with health insurance.
The US made a conscious decision not to invest in national health insurance, but
instead politically went in the direction to invest in science,
particularly through the NIH and going into universities.
And so, essentially wartime research provides a model and
a catalyst to establish a template for the future.
And the biggest example of this is the development of the nuclear bomb through
the Manhattan project, which really as much as the government was
engaged it lost almost to develop and then later to drop the bomb.
Obviously, the military, it was a civilian administration that looked over it.
It was a partnership with academics with the University of Chicago, Berkeley
the birth of Lawrence Livermore Labs tied to Berkeley with Robert Oppenheimer and
then a whole variety of academics from the East Coast as well as the Midwest to pull
it all together.
It was funded by government, but
researchers worked generally in their own institutions And
this became really the model for how NIH was to fund medical science.
And we see at that point, universities changed dramatically both in buildings and
structures and funding as a result of this area.
And lots of things get spent when off of that can later be owned by
the inventors at the universities that are academics or
the folks who are funding those academics to turn them into private enterprises.