Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Founding Father of Fake Cancer Cures

Episode Date: March 3, 2020

Robert is joined by Billy Wayne Davis to discuss Harry Hoxsey, the fake Cancer-Curing Alex Jones of the 1950s!FOOTNOTES: Cancer War: The FDA Vs. Harry Hoxsey HOXSEY, HARRY M. The Medical Messiahs: Chapter 17 The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery  Nature Doctors The History of The Hoxsey Formula in Cancer Support Hoxsey Herbal Therapy Carrying their last hopes, ill Americans cross border Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's metastasizing my tumors? I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards. Back on the old introduction schema, trying it out. How are we feeling about that? I loved it. Yeah, everybody loves a good metastasization. That's a great word.

One of my favorites. It sounds satisfying. You're Billy Wayne Davis. Depending on who's asking the question. Yes, yes, there are no lawmen in the room, so you are Billy Wayne Davis. Yes. How are you doing, Billy? I'm good. Overall.

Do you have any exciting plans for, I don't know, roughly like two weeks from now? Yeah, I do. A little more? Like a Sunday? Three? Yeah, like a Sunday? Yes, I do. Like a Sunday somewhere between two and three weeks from now? In a city somewhere between Phoenix and San Francisco?

Yes, I'll be there. I do have specific plans. Yeah, this is all on and up. Yeah, this episode was supposed to be advertising for this thing happening in between Phoenix and San Francisco, but it's sold out, so there's no need to draw up excitement anymore. No, there's no need. It's the best. There's no work involved. No, and I suggest that as a result, we callously disregard the emotions of our fans in this episode. I thought we already did that.

Yeah, yeah, but like hardcore negging. Oh, like aggressively, not on purpose. Yeah, like really, really aggressively. Speaking of aggressive, Billy. Yes. How do you feel about cancer? I don't like it. Not a fan, huh? Not a cancer stan?

Overall, no. Overall, but there's some upsides. I can't, you know, you can't say there's not upsides to everything, so. There are, yeah, every now and then the right person gets cancer, and I don't want to disregard, you know, I'm very much a most death fear not of man because men die sort of guy. Like, who's the most recent guy who died of cancer who sucked? Well, I'd say Limbaugh just got it. Limbaugh, exactly, exactly.

Like people were like, okay, all right, like, I think it's the best people were like, some people were excited, but everybody else was like, I don't feel anything, that's probably good. Cancer's like a drunk redneck with like a short barrel AR-15 with one of those 240 round drums. He doesn't often hit what he's aiming at, but every now and then he does. That is a great, is a terrible and great analogy of this. So, I don't know, in all seriousness, cancer is a big pile of ass. And it's unfortunately one of those asses that medical science is not as equipped to kick as we might like.

And despite the wonderful advances in medicine over the last century, thousands of people every year wind up in the nightmarish situation of having some doctor tell them, I'm sorry, but there's just nothing we can do. And even more people wind up in the position of a doctor saying, we can beat this, but the treatment's really going to suck balls. And the fear and pain that accompanies both these situations presents a real opportunity for the very worst people on earth. And that is where you and I come in Billy, because our business is the very worst people on earth.

I don't like when you said all those things and then opportunity. Opportunity. It's like, well, that wasn't a word I was thinking about. Okay. So yeah, there's a whole industry out there, as I'm sure you're aware, to sell people bogus cancer cures. And we'll be doing some episodes in the near future talking about Black Sav and all these other terrible things that people sell on Facebook to cure each other's cancers.

But today, I thought we would talk with the man who invented the modern fake cancer cure industry. A fellow named Harry Hoxie. Have you ever heard of Harry Hoxie? No, I haven't. I would remember that name, too. That's a good sketchy. Yeah, H-O-X-S-E-Y. Yeah.

So, Harry Hoxie might be the greatest of the cancer con men. And that's who we're going to talk about. That was on his business card. Harry Hoxie, cancer con man. Cancer con man, yeah. I'll kill you, cancer, but not really. That I'm not going to. Harry M. Hoxie, the M stands for metastasize, was born on October 23rd, 1901,

Auburn, Illinois, so we're already off to a bad start. Just in the middle of nothing. Middle of goddamn nothing. I fucking spent some early years in Glen Carbon, so I can say that about Illinois. Yeah. It's nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

He was the youngest of 12 children, and we do not know much about his parents, really, but we can safely assume that they loved to fuck. That's what I was going to say. They liked to fuck. They liked to fuck. Because you don't get pregnant every time. No, and you don't get 12 kids who all make it out of that hole alive in that day and age without, like, really... Putting the effort in.

Yeah, you put in the time, exactly. Yeah, he's selling his fields. Yeah, he sure is. Harry's father, John, owned a livery stable, which was essentially the gas station of the day, and he also worked as a veterinary surgeon. This does not mean that he was... That's just too different. Gas station surgeon.

Where do you take your horse? This guy owns a gas station. He does brain surgery on horses. It's actually worse than that. So, yeah, the fact that he was a veterinarian does not mean he was a learned man. His license to practice pet medicine was granted under the grandfather clause of the Illinois Medical Practice Act of 1877. So in 1877, Illinois was like, there's too many people saying these doctors who ain't doctors. And now, if you're going to say you're a doctor, you got to have a medical license.

But it was one of those things, like, you know, when people talk about, like, banning assault rifles, and they're like, the ones who aren't, like, bedowa worker, like, well, let you keep your guns, they'll be grandfathered in. They kind of did the same thing with people who weren't doctors, but had been working as doctors prior to 1877. They're like, yeah, you can keep saying it. You can keep saying you're a doctor, yeah. Okay, this is easier than arguing with all of you guys.

Yeah, we'll just let you keep being fake doctors. Compromise is the undergirding of democracy, Billy. It is. It is. So, Harry Hoxie's dad was not a doctor, but got to keep pretending to be a veterinary doctor, because he'd been doing it for so long, even though his qualifications didn't really extend far beyond having a saw. Now, okay, it is an interesting position where, like, you can't say you're a doctor anymore.

I'm like, I've been being a doctor for a long time. Who says I'm not a doctor? I've been saying it so long. All these people say they call me Doc. I feel like I said I was a doctor about as long time as it'll take to get a medical degree. But you've killed a lot of people. Well, but most of them was horses. He's got a point. Just let him be.

There's like so many counties we have to go to. Yeah, that's generally basically how it worked out. So, Hoxie's dad, John, was a veterinarian, but not really, but legally he was. And decades later in the 1950s, Hoxie would claim that his family's knowledge of the healing arts went back even further. He started to claim that in 1840, his grandfather, John Hoxie, a horse breeder, had a prized stallion that developed a huge cancerous lesion. John had put the horse out to pasture and waited for it to die.

But then the beast found a clump of shrubs and plants and just spent days eating them almost exclusively. And to John's shock, the animal healed. Oh, wow. Okay, yeah. And this is not impossible. There are cases in scientific literature of animals seeking out medicinal herbs on their own to deal with problems. It does happen. So, the story goes that John watched his prize horse cure itself,

and then he went out and he gathered up all the herbs that had been revealed to him by what he called horse scents. That's the key to good medicine. I mean, if someone was pitching that to me and they were like, horse scents, I'd be like, okay, go on. Okay, let's keep hearing this. Yeah, see Billy and Dr. Horse, the hit Netflix miniseries coming to your streaming service. I want a horse around until he looks at some grass and I'm like, eat that. Yeah, the horse is just squeezing on a baster to shoot bleach up people's assholes.

I didn't do it. The horse did it. Yeah. Ain't no law that says a horse can't illegally practice bleach medicine. Yes, he's Reverend Dr. Ed. So, John Hoxie Sr. turns this horse scents medicine into a SAV, and he starts using it on all of his other sick animals. And over the years, he found it- There's a lot of sick animals. That makes sense.

Yeah, that does track. Yeah. And over the years, he found it was very effective at treating cancer, sores, and other illnesses in his herd. His SAV was so effective that other people began seeking out his help for their sick animals. And that, Harry Hoxie would later claim, is how his dad ended up as a vet. I mean, it is just the most farmer bullshit you've ever heard, though. Aspects of its scan.

Yes. I'll say that. Yeah, oh. Aspects of its scan. Without a doubt, yes. Yeah. A mini of tobacco spit was put on my B-6. Oh, yeah.

Like, that's, it worked. I don't know how it worked. They'd fucking work it every time. No, there is actually. Tobacco has medicinal benefits. Native Americans use it to keep away certain insects for thousands of years, and it can be used in that. Although, tobacco spits not the ideal way to do that. I understand that.

Yeah, though, as I got older, I was like, you could have just used the tobacco, I think. Yeah, you could. You could just put some spats. Yeah, rub, yeah. You didn't have to spit on me. Yeah. But I mean, that's the thing about Southern medicine.

If it can be spit on you, it will be spit on you. It's more fun. It's a funner delivery device. It is. They're not wrong about everything. No. They're usually right about all the fun stuff. So, Harry's grandfather handed his recipe down to his son,

and from the age of eight, he began to help out in his dad's business. But as often happens, the passes of generations brought with it change. Harry's grandfather had been content to use his miracle cure on animals. But Harry's father decided, fuck it, why not try this stuff out on random human beings with cancer? That ain't no different than animals. It cures what I'm pretty sure is horse cancer. It'll cure what I'm pretty sure is people cancer.

Rub it on your head. For years, the Hoxie successfully cured all kinds of cancers with the magic of horse science until John Hoxie died in 1919. As the story goes, on his deathbed, Harry's father gave him the recipe for making the special family sav. He told his son, now you have the power to heal the sick and save lives. Why, he did that on the deathbed? Yeah, on his deathbed.

He saved that at the end? He was like, hey. Yeah, right at the end. Here's how you make it. Here's the ticket to saving all mankind with the sav. Yup. Yup. You wait until your deathbed for that one.

Two teaspoons. Wait, is that, do you say table? Is that a table? What is that? That's a dumb it. God damn it. This is obviously, obviously a lie. It's all so blatant.

I think that's when I see it go big like that. That's when I'm like, ah. Yeah. We'll get into why exactly this, like how this lie came about later. Obviously it is a lie. We know this for a number of reasons. But the most obvious of the fact is that Harry's story changed wildly over the years. Before publishing his biography, you don't have to die in 1956.

Harry claimed that his father had developed the sav on his own in 1908. The versions of the story Harry told also tended to leave out the critical fact of how his father died. Cancer. Ah. Yeah. His mother also died of cancer in 1921. But not horse cancer. Not horse cancer.

They did not die of horse cancer. Some folks might suggest that a cancer cure that failed to say both the cure's mother and father might not be a cancer cure. But let's be fair. Mechanics still get flat tires, you know. Personal trainers put on a couple extra pounds around the holidays. It's unreasonable to hold every cancer cure to the standard of actually curing cancer. Yes. Yes.

That is unreasonable. You're not going to have any magical cancer cures then. I mean, how are flea markets going to really exist? Yeah. Very fair. Think of small business owners like Harry Hoxie. Now, the reality of Harry's backstory seems to be that he quit school at age 15 and started working as a coal miner. He later moved on to selling insurance.

That's a good leap. That is a good leap. That is a good right into a desk job. Yeah. That's the change you want to make. You know what? My next job is not going to be this, I tell you much. Yeah.

He completed a high school correspondence course after studying at night for three years. And it is not usually explained why Harry didn't go right into his father's line of business. Perhaps he was just drawn to the raw erotic appeal of coal mining. Whatever the case, Harry would later claim that he didn't start using the formula on his own until 1922. The year after his mother's death. Huh. I do. I mean, do you think it is that teenage rebellion?

He's like, I ain't going into bullshitting like you. I'm going into real work. And then he went and did real work and he's like, man, bullshitting me is so much better. I see why dad has a fake cancer cure. You must have tried real work one time too. You know, I'm going to be honest. If there's one thing having a podcast that's taught me, that I probably could have had a fake cancer cure in the 1900s and made a good living.

And if it had been a choice between coal mining or fake cancer cure, I probably would have been a fake cancer doctor. I come from farmers and I'm a stand-up comedian. Because I think people are like, oh, did you not know how to do that? I was like, no, I know how to do all that stuff. I just don't have to. I choose to be a stand-up comedian. Yeah.

Oh, so I bet you're wondering what was the inciting incident that brought Harry Hoxie into the business of using his dad's fake horse-sense cancer cure? I can't. I don't want to. He met a Civil War veteran who had cancer of the lip. Now this veteran had found Harry, and I'm going to give you one guess as to which side of the war he wound up on. This veteran found Harry through. There was no one.

Oh, I wonder which side. It never always... Not even a question. No, he's wearing a specific shade of gray. Yes, I know which one he had. Now this Civil War veteran found Harry through a trail of myths about the boy's cancer curing family. Desperate, he begged the young man for a treatment. Harry very apologetically told the sick man that he could do nothing.

He didn't have a medical license, and that sort of thing was required now. According to Harry, the veteran responded with this line. Nobody needs a license to save lives. If I was drowning, would you stand by and watch me go down? Because a sign on yonder tree says no swimming allowed? Fucking bulletproof, watch it. I mean, it depends on if I know you or not.

I mean, it's like, yeah, actually, most professionals will say you shouldn't just, if you don't have training, swim in thereafter. That's why so many people die, because one person starts drowning, and then like three other young men will run in after him, and they'll all drown. It happens every year, constantly. Now, in his recitations of the story, Harry claimed, there's no adequate answer to that kind of logic, and I didn't waste any time in trying to find one.

Instead, he set right to using his magical horse medicine on the dying veteran's cancer. The cancer was cured, and for years afterwards, the veteran would claim, primarily through newspaper articles, that he had been healed. And it's probably at this point that we should talk about what precisely was in the Hoxies formula. Now, the actual formula that he used throughout his career varied constantly, and included wild differences. One of the versions of it included like this, I think it was Bloodroot is the name,

which is like, it's a similar kind of compound to what you would put on a wart. You know, you put those like salicylate, and it'll burn the wart off. So one of the different formulations of the salve was that, and that sort of a compound can work on skin cancers sometimes. It usually doesn't, and it's generally so like the different types of like different formulations that come up are so like very so much that you can't rely on them to cure the cancer, but it can be used to treat cancers. And more to the point, like people back in those days had like goiters

and a bunch of weird skin things that would just like pop up on your body that weren't actually cancers, and a compound like that, an escherotic compound like that, can burn those things off. So it is entirely possible this guy had some weird lump that a doctor who wasn't really a doctor, because it was fucking 19 and dot, like said was cancer, this guy burned it off and the guy was like, he cured me. Yeah, it just looked gross and the doctor's like, whoa, that's cancer. Yeah.

Now, the most common recipe in the modern day you will see given for Hoxies formula is a mix of licorice, red clover, Burdock root, Stalingia root, Barbary cascara, prickly ash bark and buckthorn bark. And this was not a recipe unique to his father or his father's father's horse. Similar formulas existed in various medicinal guides at around the same time. And it was very first described in 1898. So whatever debatable health properties you want to attribute to Hoxies tonic, it definitely wasn't invented by his family.

It's a thing people had been using for a very long time. And it's not even what he used all the time. He basically just mixed up whatever the fuck he wanted most of the time. Yeah, and then the sales mode. Went into sales mode. It was all about the sales to Hoxies as opposed to like what he was actually selling, because that varied over the years. So do you think his dad believed in it and he was just more of like a...

I am not convinced his dad ever had any kind of cancer staff. I think he made that up too, but it's possible. Oh, you think his dad was made? No, you think he made up that his dad did it? Yeah. I fucking make a medicinal salve that I have given away to a couple of friends over the years. It's good for... We've used it for dogs that have a raw spot on them to stop them from gnawing on it.

And it's got everything in it as something that I can point to double-blind studies that have been conducted and show that Plantago Major does this. And that was even more common back in the day. You live out in the middle of nowhere. There's no fucking doctors. Everybody's got some weird little remedy they use. So it's entirely possible that Hoxie's dad had an actual herbal remedy that he read out of some book that his son started lying about and saying was a cancer cure too.

Who knows what happened? Yeah. Any number of things could have occurred. As we'll get into what matters is less what Hoxie was using to cure cancer and more how Hoxie marketed his cancer cure that did not cure cancer. And I want to make that really clear. You gotcha. Yeah.

So after quote unquote curing his first patient, Hoxie partnered up with two Chicago men to form the National Cancer Research Institute, a common law trust with the goal of exploring his father's magical staff. For some unknown reason, these Chicago men backed out very quickly, and Hoxie alone expanded his operations into the Hoxide Institute, which he launched in the town of Taylorville. Now, these facilities were the old headquarters of the Order of the Moose, Billy and I just gave each other the look like Hoxide,

and then you said Moose, and now Billy can't make eye contact. It's just all of it's like, it's a con man, like everywhere he goes. Yeah. And I know Illinois is technically part of the Midwest. You know, we're kind of right in that Mason-Dixon line area, but I'm going to declare it part of the South just based on this story. For sure, like from like Peoria Dam. Yeah.

Once you get, yeah, yeah, the southern part of Illinois. Yeah. No, without a doubt. I mean, you're damn near Missouri. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, the fucking Order of the Moose. So he sets up his headquarters in the old Order of the Moose building,

which he buys with the help of unnamed businessman in town, and then he's given it to the government somehow to give him a pile of money. Now, Hoxie began publishing advertisements for the Hoxide Institute next. They featured the word cancer in large bold letters followed by this copy. Any person suffering from this malady is invited to apply for authoritative information as to the cures that have been affected and are now being affected at Taylorville under strictly ethical method medical supervision painlessly without operation and with permanent results.

Those are, yeah. Strictly ethical. Yeah. We got to emphasize that. No, that doesn't make alarm bells go off when you have to say that in your pitch. No. This is ethical. This is strictly ethical.

Yeah. Why would it not be? Yeah, that's exactly how you know something's ethical. How would you know something's ethical if people didn't repeatedly tell you that they aren't con men? It makes me trust them. It makes me trust them. Mm-hmm.

Now, interested parties, most of whom were either cancer patients or their relatives, began to inquire soon and the Hawkside Institute was quickly filled with patients. Next, according to a wonderful book, The Medical Messiahs by James Harvey Young, quote, shortly the local paper began to run stories of deaths that were occurring at the Institute. Local doctors began to be concerned. One of them wrote, the high priests at the American Medical Association telling of examining a man

who would receive the Hawkside treatment. The paste had been applied to a tumor on the cheek. Two days before the man died, the doctor wrote, I was called to see him and found necrosis of not only soft tissue of his face, but a complete destruction of the mallar bone. The man died of hemorrhage at the hospital. And this is where, yeah. Was he just giving him like acid? Jesus Christ.

Yeah, that's what I was saying. One of the formulations of the salve that Hawkside used was basically, it's very similar to the stuff black salve that you see sold over like Facebook and shit today. It's a compound that burns your skin off and people will lie and say it only targets cancer skills. It burns everything. And you can potentially use types of this to burn off very specific types of skin cancer. It can work.

But the problem is that none of these people know what they're doing and they over apply it and apply it way too strongly and apply it on cancers that it can't help with. And a lot of times if you just keep applying this, it will eat through to the fucking bone. Yeah. It's like, you know, an amputation can potentially be a necessary medical treatment. If you use it for every potential illness, you're not helping anybody.

Yeah. This is that kind of thing. Cut it off. Cut it off. Like, you know, you think about like a lot of this stuff like goes back to ancient Native American remedies. And if you're in fucking the year 1500 BC and you've got a skin cancer. Yeah.

Like this has something like this will give you a better shot at survival than fucking nothing. Right? Yeah. It might work. It did on some people. That's why they used it. But by this time and like it's not the way to do things. And he's also not just using it on very specific kinds of skin cancer.

He's just giving it to everybody who's sick. And so he winds up burning through a lot of people's skulls. Cool. It's cool. Yeah. I like that doctors are like, hey, we should do something about that. Right? Yeah.

They start to. They start to be like, this seems to be a problem that he keeps dissolving the skulls of people in town. Don't. We should, should we meet up about that? Yeah. Should we, should there be a thing we do when people start melting skulls? As a medical professional, that's not good. Now it is 1924 and none of us are good at being doctors.

But I feel like this is worse. All of us that have the license should be able to agree. Right? Yeah. Now to keep the secret of his medicine. The doctor said, Hoxie bought the separate ingredients each at a different drug store. The key ingredient analysis at AMA headquarters revealed was arsenic. Hoxie's vaunted remedy was an escherotic, a corrosive chemical that ate away the flesh.

Through the ages, physicians had employed such corrosive agents and treating external cancers. But this motive procedure had become outmoded. Pastes went out with the bustle, a cancer authority has noted. So far as scientific medicine is concerned, such chemicals could not distinguish between tissues that were cancerous and tissues that were sound. The risk of damage to healthy flesh was tremendous. The escherotic might eat into the blood vessels and cause death through bleeding. Surgery was much safer and more certain. So, yeah.

Yeah, I agree with the last part. Yeah. You know what's even safer and more certain than surgery, Billy Wayne? I got hunches. Yeah, it is the products and services that support this podcast. And I feel like the FDA will support us when we say that every one of these products cures cancer better than randomly applying arsenic to your face. I would, I'll put my name on that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. Well, yes. Maybe, yeah. Yeah. No, not my name. I will put Billy's name on that too. No, put my name on it. Put a version of my name.

Billy's name is on all of it. Referring Dr. Yes. Billy Wayne Davis. Billum. Yep. Billum Davis. No, Reverend Dr. Billionaire Wayne Davis.

Yes, Billionaire Wayne Davis. Perfect. Billionaire Wayne Davis. Well, help make Billy a billionaire by purchasing products from companies that are unrelated to him. Service. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we are talking about Harry Hoxie's Burn Your Face Off Clinic in Taylorville, Illinois. Now, the AMA did not take all this sitting down. One doctor wrote a scathing report on the Hoxide Institute in the AMA Journal, writing that tragedy would be fall cancer sufferers who are beguiled by the false beacons of the Hoxide University. The promoters of the scheme, he wrote, were reaping a rich harvest from gullibility and suffering, which is very well worded and accurate. Now, Hoxie responded in the way of all true expert charlatans.

He sued the AMA for libel and demanded a quarter of a million dollars. You pay me. And I have to say, we're going to talk about this later. This is the first time someone's really done this, that one of these medical charlatans has taken the fight to the people trying to bust him in an organized way. And he will continue to. He's not really the goat ball doctor, who we will also talk about later, is kind of doing this in a similar timeframe. But Hoxie is on the cutting edge of establishing how to attack the medical establishment to secure your right to sell poison. That is.

He's one of the founding fathers of that. Everything needs a pioneer again. Everything needs a pioneer. That's a pioneering is always good. Doesn't matter what you are. Nope. You should be rewarded for being the first. I'm going to be the pioneer just chopping off cancerous lesions real fucking fast with a machete. I bet that you're not even the first that's done that.

No. If this being a guest of this podcast has taught me. I will not be the first, but I will be the fastest and the drunkest. And that's something to be proud of. He might not be the drunkest either. Yeah, there's actually no way I will be the drunkest. If all the history I've read is correct. No.

You won't. No. If I can walk, I won't be as drunk as the average doctor in 1838. Or any of the founding fathers. Oh, God. So the case spent several years wandering through the courts before the AMA finally insisted it go to trial. And this seems to have been them calling Hoxie's bluff.

He did never want the court case to go to trial. He just wanted to be able to constantly raise money off of talking about this case that he was fighting. And the AMA was like, no, let's fucking go to court. He's like, no, that's not what we're doing now. He was kind of shocked to wind up in court and he was not actually prepared for a lawsuit and did not have any of the things ready that he needed to have ready. And so the judge dismissed his claims. Perhaps his lawyers were distracted because at the same time they were fighting a lawsuit

brought against Hoxie by the family of one of his dead patients. So accused of practicing medicine without a license, Harry pled guilty and received $100 fine. This would be one of dozens of convictions for practicing medicine without a license. That's it. That's it. What? That's all he got? Yeah, $100.

I mean, it's a lot of money back then. No, it's not. He did a lot of murders is what he did. He got away with the murder for $100. Yeah. It's more money then, but it is your right. Absolutely not enough to stop him from his behavior. He doesn't even slow him down.

No, no, because you don't have to pay it. Yeah. I mean, it does have an impact because he's forced to close the Hoxide Institute in 1928 after just four years. So like you could argue, you know, it did something, but it did not stop Harry's dream of curing cancer with horse medicine. He immediately founded another cancer institute in Jacksonville. And when this was shut down, he tried the chat town of Gerard, Illinois, where he'd grown up. Somehow he managed to call in the town chamber of commerce and to letting him celebrate his return home with Hoxide, a fourth of July like celebration band playing in a small crowd of grateful patients giving their loud testimonials.

He's got Moxie. He does have Hoxie. He's got Moxie. He does have Moxie. He does. If only he had actually been selling Moxie, which is, of course, a mixture of MIPT and MDMA that is a delightful way to spend an evening. Okay, I'll take it. Okay.

Yeah, it fucking rules. Yeah. So a fellow who is described in the literature as an eclectic doctor from Indiana, praised Hoxie Savv. Well, that's what they called Larry Bird, too. Eclectic doctor. The eclectic doctor from Indiana. And a local minister delivered a speech that praised Harry Hoxie as a figure of near religious character. I love my country because its heroes are such characters as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, who love to serve but not to rule.

I love Hoxie because he does not want to rule the world but serve the world. No. God. It's a great speech. It is a good speech. It's just, God, if you just get a good performer, there's... It's all you need. It really is.

It's remarkable. Yeah, and just don't get too full of yourself. You could do that forever. Yeah. Now, with this preamble complete, Hoxie took up the stage to address his once and future neighbors. Quote from Hoxie. I'm not going to say that word with my accent. Not with my accent.

Nope. Oh, yep, you know what? Yep. Good call. Love my career and my children. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. As soon as you said that, I was like, nope. Yeah. Sitting this one out. Everyone, y'all have fun playing. I'll be over here. Yeah. After warming up the crowd with some random insults, Hoxie zeroed in on attacking the medical establishment, declaring so-called real doctors with licenses, hard-hearted, and only interested in having their hand greased with plenty of money so they could buy fancy cars.

He noted that he'd invited the AMA to this rally, but that they'd refused to attend. Oh, why? Why don't they fight in the open? Why don't they take this platform? Why don't they prove the Hoxie affairs as fake as they say? Look at you over there being doctors curing things. Why won't you come to my parade and tell me my burning treatment don't cure cancer? Say it to my face.

Say it to my face. Say it to these dead people's burnt-off faces. Yeah, you gotta work hard to find what's left of the faces, but it's in there. They'd say it to. Yeah, you're gonna have to shout it because of the ears and the burning. But there's no cancer. Now, the AMA was in fact aware of all this, but letters written internally at the time show they basically concluded that the best thing to do was let Hoxie run his little clinic for a while. They felt it would soon become clear that his treatment was worthless and then he'd be run out of town.

This is an ethically dubious approach, but it kind of worked, and Hoxie soon found himself fleeing Gerard. It does sound like an Andy Griffith approach to it. Yeah, this is exactly how Andy Griffith would handle it. Yeah, that's an Andy Griffith they were like, just, it'll get around. He's burning people's faces. Yeah, folks will figure out pretty soon. They dumb, but they ain't that dumb. Barney comes back in half his face. He's like, you're right, Andy, I ain't got a face. That would be the first act of the episode. It's Barney getting his face burned off. We gotta get his face back.

Yeah. Now, Hoxie was fined twice more in Illinois for practicing medicine without a license. As an instinctive grifter, Harry Hoxie knew exactly two things. Number one, the key to grifting is to never ever admit defeat. And number two, the second key to grifting is to move somewhere with fewer laws if the laws keep getting in the way of your con. That's really everything about grifting. Solid. But as we've learned, they all don't stick to those rules.

They do not stick to those rules, and that is what damns them in the end. But this is not the end. So very next, Hoxie moved his cancer clinic to the Mexico of Illinois. Oh, okay. To Mexico. I was like, no, he didn't go to America. No, not yet. He goes to the Mexico of Illinois, which is of course Iowa. And he teamed up with another random guy there, another fake doctor. He thought he could cure cancer, and the two worked together briefly until the state of Iowa realized what was going on and forbade Hoxie from treating cancer patients ever again.

So actually, Iowa handles this very well. I can't not make fun of Iowa, and I'm not going to change. They deserve it. They deserve it. It's pretty. There's not a single state in this union I will not mock except for Montana, because I am frightened of it. Yeah, and it's awesome. Yeah, it is awesome. Yeah, it rules. That is another reason.

Now, this began a period of travel for Harry Hoxie. He moved to Detroit, and then Wheeling, West Virginia, and then Atlantic City, setting up cancer clinics and having them almost immediately busted. The AMA followed him the whole way. It's hard to get busted in West Virginia for anything. It's fucking Billy the Kid's hometown. It's hard for those people to be like, hey, come on. We're West Virginia, and you went a step too far for us. Come on.

We made it mandatory for six-year-olds to carry handguns, but this is a step beyond what we're comfortable with. You can't be burning people's face off. Get out of here. Now, the AMA followed him the whole way, and he accumulated convictions for practicing medicine without a license at the normal rate men accumulate Twitter suspensions. By 1936, Harry Hoxie was tired of getting constantly, almost immediately caught in law slammed by the medical establishment. He decided to head to the most lawless, vile, hateful, wretched, and untrustworthy city in the United States of America, the one place where a medical con man like him could truly thrive. I'm talking, of course, about Dallas, Texas. Maybe.

Yeah. Yeah. That scans. Yeah. Yeah. A lot. It's mostly ego in that city. Oh, so you've met my brother.

You can get away with everything in Dallas, Texas. You can. It's comical. Yeah, that leads, I mean, the chamber of commerce, the modern chamber of commerce's motto is Dallas, Texas, you can get away with it here. To my land. Yeah. This isn't a joke. This is just the truth of Dallas, Texas.

I would say 80% of the crimes I've committed in my life have been in Dallas, Texas, and no consequences. This is so funny. It's a great tap. It's fun. It is fun. We should go there for tour. It's like Texas, Vegas. We need to do a show in Dallas for all the reasons that just got listed.

Yeah. We'll do a show in Dallas, and I'm sure commit a couple more crimes there. Now, for the actual work of spreading horse medicine on dying people, Harry turned to a handful of homeopathic, osteopathic, and eclectic doctors. These were people who had medical licenses, so it was not illegal for them to practice non-medicine on cancer patients. And you'd think that with a situation like this, like this pretty sweet gig for a guy like Harry Hoxie, you'd think he'd be able to avoid getting in more trouble for practicing medicine without a license. But in the great tradition of medical conmen, Harry possessed a deep and uncontrollable need to really just get his hands in there. Yeah. They do.

They do have that need. You can't stop them. You can't stop them. It is. Even when they don't need to, when they're already rich. They can't. They fucking can't. It is.

And it's the thing that's most confusing about these guys. Obviously, they are mostly just vile conmen who want to make a shitload of money and don't care if it works or not. That's a factor. But there has to be an element of belief or something that makes them want to do it themselves. Like, there's something else going on. It is a narcissistic thing. Yeah. I'm with you because there is that thing of like, I'll fucking do this.

Oh, I can fucking fix this. Yeah. You can't. There's states telling us. You absolutely cannot. You can't. Multiple states. You've gone through like half of them at this point.

A lot of the country. You keep killing people. He's like, no, cancer does. He's like, no, you sped it up. Yeah. You really, really made it faster. It is. But there is something I also love that every state he goes to, there's like, he always

teams up with the new person. So that's a key though. That cracks me up because I like to think of that moment where they both realize like, wait, you're a full of shit too. I'm a full of shit. You want to, yeah. Should we make more money off of this? Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know. Harry was caught practicing medicine without a license and fined $25,000 and given a five month sentence in jail. And especially compared to his first penalty for practicing medicine without a license. This is pretty, pretty reasonable penalty. It's at least a good start. Damn. But Harry was still, he was practicing in Texas.

And even though Texas levied this nice fine on him, he was able to appeal the fine to a higher court within the state who decided, what are we doing punishing this guy? He seems nice. Get out of jail, you scamp. So, Texas was the right place to move, in other words. Harry was able to avoid future issues of getting convicted of practicing medicine without a license, by convincing the American Naturopathic Association to award him an honorary Doctor of Naturopathy degree. And it's kind of hard for me to figure out exactly how this happened.

I've done a bit of digging, which suggests that this honorary status at the time was conferred upon people who made $10 donations to the association. It may have been that easy. I don't know. It may have been that easy. Well, judging by his background, he is that clever where he was like, what is this, $10? Okay. Shit. Hell yeah.

Yeah. It also might have been a situation where they came to him and offered him the honorary degree because he was so prominent within like this natural medicine community that was really in like the 30s and 40s starting to grow into a thing. So they might have reached out to him because he was so prominent. I really don't know. Now, at this point, though, we should talk a little bit about naturopathy. The term was coined by a guy named John Shield in 1895. And John sold this word to the father of naturopathy, a man named Benedict Lust.

Aldrin Shield Lust. Yeah. It's amazing. Benedict Lust used the word naturopathy, which he had again purchased to found the American School of Naturopathy in 1901. This was reorganized in 1919 as the American Naturopathy Association. It grew rapidly up into the 1930s. Most states at this point were not willing to grant naturopath licenses. And so at first, the only licensed naturopathic doctors were either in England or in the American West.

Even after naturopathy suffered its first collapse as a discipline in the 1940s, it remained incredibly prevalent in the Pacific Northwest and it is today. I was going to say, it's still going pretty strong. Still a big deal. And at this time, the Southwest is like the heart of the naturopathy movement. And Texas has a hell of a lot of these people. So modern naturopathy is not a subject within the bounds of this episodes. And it's changed what it means over the years, a fair amount.

But in the 1930s and in Texas, the term basically meant a doctor who doesn't want to follow all those rules other doctors follow. Which is, you're right, Texas is the perfect place for that attitude. Oh, God, he's right. Yeah, you're right. It's perfect. One of the things about being a southerner is in one of the things about being a libertarian, honestly, is that everything I love and everything I hate about both the South and libertarianism is bound up in each other.

So what I love about the South is this attitude of like, leave me the fuck alone. Do not tell me what to do. I identify with that strongly. I plan to live in the middle of nowhere very soon. I love that attitude. But it's also the attitude that gives you nonsense doctors. Because it's like, nobody should tell this guy he can't burn cancer off of people's faces. Yes.

And it takes another person like that to look and be like, no, no, no, that guy's full of shit. That's a bad idea, guys. As a fuck you kind of person, that guy's a bad fuck you kind of person. Yeah. And it's just this kind of thing that like, you just can't trust the free market to sort this shit out. No. Because the free market has no problem with this guy making a fuckload of money lighting people's faces on fire with acid.

Free market is trying to make their own money. So we're not looking at what you're doing. That's why regulation. Okay. It's why the AMA is a good thing to exist despite some flaws that it has. And especially in this period, the AMA is really doing the Lord's work of trying to stop this shit. So while Hoxie started his Dallas practice, this was right at the time that medicine was in the throes of what's known as the chemotherapeutic revolution.

So chemotherapy has just become a thing at this point. And it brought hope to countless cancer sufferers. It still does. But chemo, yeah, it still does. But chemo is also really fucking unpleasant to receive. And it was even worse in the 1930s. It's a shitty thing to have to go through even though it absolutely does save a huge number of lives. But horrible stories about painful chemo treatments that had a lower success rate than they do today

helped to drive new customers to Hoxie's practice where he treated them with his horse medicine. So yeah, this is, you can see how one feeds into the other. And it's just, and what sucks is like, it's not a lot of dum-dums go into him. It's just people that are like, just help. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, just please help me. And a lot of them are folks who like, you know, cancer treatment was even more primitive. A lot of them are people, there probably was nothing the science could do to help them.

So they go to him in desperation and he makes their last months even worse, you know? And we'll talk about what a lot of his patients were too, because it's even more complicated than that. But Billy, you know what's even better than chemotherapy? Oh yeah, a lot of stuff. Capitalism therapy, buddy. Capitalism therapy. Yeah, that's debatable. It'll reduce the, you know, a full wallet is a kind of metastatic tumor, Billy. I've never felt it.

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We're back. So the early years of Harry Hoxie's wandering practice had involved him mostly using that pace that burnt off cancers. And he primarily treated stuff like those weird lip cancers and goiters and weird shit like that veteran came in with. And he also treated a lot of breast cancer and unfortunately a lot of ovarian cancer and other external cancers. Now, part of why he had a lot of positive testimonials from patients is that much of what he treated was not cancer. A lot of it was warts and lumps and things people thought might be cancer. And he would tell them it was cancer and then he would burn it off and most of these people would wind up being fine. And so it's like, ah, yeah, I saved your life. I cured your fucking cancer.

It was in Dallas that Hoxie first began claiming that he could treat internal cancers too. And this evolution was probably a direct reaction to chemotherapy. So now chemotherapy is claiming it can treat internal cancers. Hoxie's going to start treating internal cancers too. Fuck you, me too. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah, sure. So most of his mixtures varied, but most of them included a mix of water, potassium iodide, which is generally used to loosen mucus,

an herbal accident called cascara, sugar, and a few other herbs. So taking it would absolutely provoke a physical response, you know, which is part of how people feel like they're, oh, I'm purging, you know, all this toxic stuff. So he's kind of the first guy to realize that if you just make people shit a bunch, they'll feel like they're healing. That is, yeah, I mean, that's what a good hangover does too. Absolutely. If you shit a bunch, you're like, I am healed, the poison is getting out. Yeah. All those, uh, skinny tea scams that influence surgery are that.

I was just thinking of that. Shit, you're way too health. That cleanse, what is it, you put the... You just, it's literally just shit pills. Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah. Where you eat a bunch or you just drink a bunch of syrup and shit. No, that's just...

Yeah. You're just... Shit your way to better health. Flushing your system. Yeah, and not eating for days so that you get like those quick, you know, uh, those quick results that don't actually stay. Yeah. Um, yeah. So, uh, he also had a medication he would give people that was basically just Pepto-Bismol, which was a common medication at the time.

Um, Hoxy prescribed it to you with the nauseating effects of his other mixture. So some of these drugs did have medicinal effects, but none of them cured cancer. And I'm going to quote again from the book, The Medical Messiahs. Hoxy and his spokesman were frank to confess they did not completely know. We have been too busy treating cancer victims and fighting court battles to keep our clinic open. He asserted in his autobiography to spare the time, personnel and facilities for objective study. His hypothesis in its bluntest version held that a major chemical imbalance in the body caused normal cells to mutate into a cancerous form. And his medicines restored the original chemical environment, checking and killing the cancerous cells.

This hypothesis could be elaborated at length, as in an address delivered to Hoxy's medical director, into a complicated fantasy of a relevant scientific and pseudoscientific jargon that sounded very impressive to the layman, but caused genuine cancer experts to grieve. It makes things worse as the experts assess the... Yeah. Just to grieve. To grieve. Yeah.

They felt like something just died. Yeah. They were just like, God, this is bad. What made things worse, as the experts assessed to Hoxy theories, was that the Hoxy literature condemned the only treatments yet found valid in cancer therapy. And I really want to emphasize here what a pioneering grifter Harry Hoxy was. Generations of snake oil salesmen pioneered the fine art of lying about the efficacy of their own medication.

The downside of this is the fact that it puts a lot of pressure on your treatment to actually work. Hoxy only promised a better than 50% success rate with his own treatment, rather than trying to present it as a perfect panacea. He emphasized that it just had a higher success rates than conventional medicine. Hoxy's whole marketing strategy pivoted around a shit-talking real medicine, rather than talking up his fake medicine. So that's cool. Wow.

Yeah. He's... Ugh. He's a genius. I mean, you're not wrong, but he doesn't use his powers for good. That's for sure. No. It's just...

No. I mean, it'd be one thing if he wasn't trying to discredit credible science. But then he wouldn't be successful. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. It's like you look at right now why alternative medicine and goop and all this shit is like the biggest it's been in decades as an industry. It's because Facebook and shit have spread this welter of propaganda that has people less trusting of modern medical science than they ever have been. And other shit plays into that, the fact that we don't have universal healthcare,

the fact that people are going broke trying to get treated and the whole medical system is this very unfriendly mess to get into and all of the scammers are very friendly and nice. And all these different Facebook support groups, people share their stories about using bullshit medicine to treat themselves and attack mainstream medicine at the same time. It's all... Harry Hoxie is the first guy to realize this and to try to do it. But it doesn't reach its apothesis until the internet really makes it possible to convince a bunch of people that doctors are all in on a scam. I mean, and... It's great.

You look at the opioid epidemic too. Yeah. Just like you're talking about all those factors. So you're like, you look at all of it, come on, you're like, I can see where it's just a fucking field day for this. Great stuff. So part of how Harry Hoxie did this was by having his own medical professionals write papers and studies lambasting the mainstream medical industry or whatever you want to call it. His own medical director, JB Durkey, gave lectures where he would claim, in my opinion, X-ray and radium have no place in the treatment of cancer. They upset basic cell metabolism rather than do anything to correct it.

A printed version of Durkey's lecture was handed out to new patients in order to convince them that actual medicine would only make them sicker. New patients, generally sick and afraid, were first sat down with a clerk who wrote down their medical history. This included data on what their other actual doctors had told them. Records were requested, and then lab tests were carried out from time to time they even did biopsies and took X-rays. To prospective patients, the whole encounter at Hoxie's clinic would have felt very similar to a visit with their normal doctor. And this was another of Hoxie's great innovations, alternative medicine that looked from the outside just like regular medicine. And it is this weird situation where you have to convince people that regular doctors are full of shit and trying to scam them, but you also, the more like a regular doctor's office your office feels, the more successful your con is going to be.

It's like a church that opens a coffee shop. Exactly like a church that opens a coffee shop. Hey man, are you lost? You're like, yeah, I am lost. I am lost inside. There's a cappuccino and some Jesus. Now, the dangerous nonsense didn't start until after a cancer diagnosis had been given to the patient, which of course was given in roughly 100% of cases. External cancers were treated with burning agents.

Internal cancers were given all sorts of weird liquids alongside a course of vitamins, laxatives and antacids. Once the treatment was prescribed, the patient was taken to Hoxie's business manager. The standard fee started at $300, which was about $5,500 in modern money. God. Yeah, it's a good racket, man. It is a good racket. This worked extremely well and soon Hoxie was making bank. The whole thing would have looked pretty reputable to most observers at the time. He only claimed around a 50 to 60% success rate between the few surface cancers that were actually eradicated by this burning compound

and the fact that many of his patients didn't really have cancer. He had a lot of satisfied customers. And as the money rolled in, Harry Hoxie decided he had to innovate one more time by doing something no medical grifter had ever done before. He attempted to get Congress on his side. Well, I thought you were going to say he is going to raise someone from the dead. No, no, no, they've all done that. Yeah. In 1945, he visited the National Cancer Institute in Washington, D.C.,

backed up by three congressmen who were believers in his therapy. The NCI had been created in 1935 with the goal of bringing serious resources to bear in the fight against cancer. Since the state of the field was more primitive back then, they were trying everything. And there was a willingness from within the NCI's doctors to see if there might be something to Hoxie's treatments. See, you guys, Congress has always been corrupt and stupid. And mostly stupid, very corrupt, but stupid is the dominant thing. Stupid. They're stupid. So dumb, so unbelievably dumb.

It's not new. When people are like, this is the end. You're like, no, this is how it's always been. They have always been exactly this dumb. Things have always been exactly this dumb. They're just faster now. And we just see it way more clear. Yeah. That's true. It is more clear than it has been. It is clear, thankfully, thanks to the work of pioneering journalists like The Washington Post,

who put up great columns like why we need more elitism in politics. Finally. Finally someone's saying it. Someone's brave enough to say it. Thank you. So yeah, he goes with these congressmen to the NCI to see if there's any. And the doctors there are like, yeah, well, we'll take a look at your treatments. Why not? And I'm going to quote from the medical messiahs to discuss what happened next.

To avoid burdening the council with trivial and patently feudal suggestions, criteria had been established to govern which methods of treating cancer among those proposed, warranted investigation and possible testing. When Hoxie, the congressman in tow, showed up at the institute, the NCI's director, Dr. R. R. Spencer, explained these criteria. The institute, he said, would be glad to present Hoxie's case to the advisory council if he would furnish certain information. He must reveal his formula and explain his techniques of treatment in detail. He must also present a record of at least 50 cases treated by his method.

Each case must represent an individual in whom the presence of internal cancer had been confirmed by competent biopsy who had been treated by physicians and given up as hopeless and who had then been treated by Hoxie and had survived from three to five years. Reasonable requirements, right? Seemingly. Yeah. And there was no chance that Hoxie was going to provide any of this. He did send the NCI's 60 case studies, but their minimal review showed that none of his files were of any use at all.

He hadn't documented any of the stuff he was supposed to document. They couldn't contact any of these people. It was just like, he basically was writing it on a piece of paper. I cured this guy. I cured this guy too. This guy's better. Fixed. Fixed.

The NCI told him that he was going to need to provide them with much more information on his patients if they were going to review his treatment properly. And Hoxie decided that this was evidence that the NCI had been compromised by the vile beasts at the American Medical Association. He later wrote, I was bitterly disappointed, disillusioned, and shocked. That's my favorite part of anyone full of shit is when someone like this hears their pitch out in a nice way. We're like, hell yeah. What you got?

What you got? Do the dance. What you got? And then they're like, and the salesman's like, oh, we got these people. And like, cool. That sounds great. Now, we just need you to answer these very simple questions. Very basic questions.

Very simple questions. And then the other person's like, how dare you? And you're like, okay. All right. That's what you got your move? All right. And we're done. That's so it's, ugh.

Yeah. It's amazing. It rules. It rules, Billy. Is it pure ego? Is that what gets you to that room doing that? It reminds me of the Casey Anthony thing where she walks him to the place she worked at and then just walked to the end of the wall and was like, I didn't really work here. I don't know.

I think there's ego certainly involved, but I feel this is a colder scheme on his part. And I'll explain why. So he doesn't give up just because the NCI is like, you're going to have to provide us with real evidence. Never assumed he was done. Yeah. He goes to one of his pet congressmen next, a senator named Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, of course. Now, one of Thomas's constituents, possibly planted by Hoxie, had gone to Elmer and like raved about the fact that this guy's horse medicine had saved his son. And he'd urged Thomas to visit the clinic.

And Senator Thomas obliged. He held a hearing transcribed by a court reporter where he questioned a number of patients that he'd let Hoxie select, who all told him positive stories of their treatment. He told the senator he was willing to put his medicine up to any kind of test. This was an empty promise. No test followed and Hoxie had no intention of ever submitting the one, but he had what he wanted. This printed testimony written by a court reporter of an actual senator questioning his patients. He printed this up and published it as final proof of his pet treatment's efficacy. And he was able to be like, no, we went to the NCI and, you know, we've submitted data to the NCI.

So for the rest of time, you could say like, oh, we sent them our data. Like we're trying to play a ball here. It's the AMA that doesn't really want to look into what we're doing. He was all a scheme. Yeah. Smart. It's always been going on. Yeah.

Now, there were, of course, lawsuits against Hoxie from patients that his treatments had failed. In the late 1940s, he was sued by a widower who claimed that his wife's death had been caused by negligent treatment at Hoxie's clinic. This was probably true, but Hoxie's lawyers protected him. He won two libel suits against Morris Fishbean, the AMA's anti-quack attack dog and the hero of our Goat Ball Doctor episode. Fishbean was absolutely correct when he called Hoxie a cancer charlatan in an article titled Blood Money, published in a major Hearst magazine. He argued that Harry's father had been a veterinarian and a dabbler in faith cures who died of cancer himself. Hoxie sued for a million dollars and won, but was awarded only two dollars. One for himself and one for his father.

And the whole case is really weird. The judge seems to have believed Hoxie's claims about the efficacy of his treatment. So the judge is dumb enough that he fell for this guy's lies. But he also acknowledged that Hoxie was sort of a grifter and that all of his marketing relied on the fact that the medical establishment was trying to stop him. So he was like, clearly, the AMA didn't damage your business by attacking you. This is how you're selling your treatment. Yes. That is a weird train of thought.

I want to try to be fair here. No, there's no fair. What are you talking about? Yeah, it's very weird. And the judge responsible for this baffling ruling was a guy named Atwell. And he was on the bench again in 1950 when the FDA went after Hoxie with the intent of hitting him with an injunction to stop him from treating cancer. Their argument rested on proving that the Hoxie treatment did not work. First, they tracked down all the patients who talked to Senator Thomas.

They eventually selected 16 cases where they were able to gather enough information to evaluate medically. All 16 of these cases fell into three categories. Either people who had never had cancer, people who had had cancer, but who had gone to chemotherapy and actually had it treated and just also taken Hoxie's treatment, or people who had actually had cancer taken only Hoxie's treatment and died horribly. So, yeah. I'm going to quote again from the medical messiahs. One of the most poignant cases presented involved a high school boy of 16 who, after a football injury, developed an extremely malignant cancer and a leg bone. When the boy's physician recommended amputation, the parents could not face this prospect and took their son instead to Hoxie's clinic.

The medical director, the father testified, had guaranteed a cure. For some four months, the lad took Hoxie's tonics. They did no good. Several months later, the boy was dead. Had the amputation been performed, the physician who had first treated the boy testified, he would have had a fighting chance. Yeah. But I don't blame the parents either. No, no, no. I mean, fuck.

It's fucked. That situation is fucked. It's also, as scientists, I'm sure, when they evaluate all this information, they're like, look, it's rarely this clear, okay? Yeah. Look, we're scientists. It's always like a little murky and then you have to wait years, but this shit's pretty clear. He's bullshit. Yeah.

God. So Hoxie did not take the stand in his own defense. Instead, he brought up even more of his happy patients to testify on his behalf. Eleven people testified that Hoxie had cured them of internal cancers. Of those claims, three were based solely on the patient's word. Four were rebutted by research from the FDA, and the last four had no diagnosis other than the word of Hoxie's medical director, Dr. Durkee. Now, the district attorney in this case pointed out that maybe, just maybe, Dr. Durkee wasn't a great guy to take as an expert on anything. He'd graduated from an osteopathic college in 1941 and only interned for a single year in an unaccredited hospital in Nebraska.

Yeah, I threw up most of the time. Yeah, I was pink in the old time, basically. God, it was gross as hell, man. During that unaccredited single year internship, he had seen at most five cancer patients. By the time he joined Hoxie's staff as his medical director in 1946, he had seen less than 20 cancer patients in his whole career. Hoxie immediately had him seeing 35 to 50 patients per day. Despite his utter lack of experience, Dr. Durkee claimed he, quote, did not need a biopsy to make a diagnosis of cancer. Nope, you don't.

Nope. You just need a good old hand dog that's got a cancer nose on him. One of them cancer dogs. He barks twice. You got it. Get out of here. Jesus Christ. It's amazing.

On the rare occasions, he did submit a biopsy to a pathological lab. The workers in those labs reported that he did such a piss-poor job that the biopsy could not be used. In a sane world, this would have been damning, but Judge Atwell liked the cut of Hoxie's jib, and he ruled that the FDA could not claim that Hoxie's cure was injurious or futile. His patient survival rate was about as good as a real doctor's. Now, the only reason it was about as good as a real doctor's is that real cancer doctors treated real cancer patients, and Hoxie was primarily treating random people who came in with random problems who he then lied and said had cancer. You see why his treatment rate was similar to a real cancer doctor's? Half of my patients who mostly don't have cancer survive, half of your patients who have cancer survive.

We're the same thing. So give me my license back. Now, yeah, it's great. It rules, Billy. It absolutely rules. It does. It inspires people like Elizabeth Holmes. Yes, it did.

The FDA appealed and asked a circuit court to grant the injunction instead, arguing that Atwell had been swayed by incompetent testimony, which he absolutely had been. A three-judge court reviewed the evidence and agreed unanimously. In particular, they found that only a biopsy could accurately diagnose cancer. A random dude's opinion that something was probably cancer was not a real diagnosis. They chided Judge Atwell for being so blind in death as to fail to see, hear, and understand the important effect of such matters on general public knowledge and acceptance. Atwell was required to institute the injunction. But before it went into effect, Hoxie appealed to the Supreme Court.

They refused to hear the case, so Hoxie went around them and had his attorney send a suggestion to Judge Atwell. They very nicely proposed that instead of banning him from shipping his internal medicines across state lines, the injunction should just ban shipment unless the drugs were labeled to show that there was, quote, a conflict of medical opinion concerning their curative claims. It's... That's modern shit right there, yeah. He's a genius. You're not wrong, but you're wrong.

Yeah. That is basically how most modern quacks get away with selling nonsense labeled as medicine today. And it's ironic to me that it actually didn't work in the early 1950s. We were just slightly less stupid about these sorts of things. So after a bunch more legal slap fighting, the original injunction was finally granted in 1953. It went into effect in 1954 after one more last ditch appeal by Hoxie. Yeah. He could no longer ship his medicine across state lines, but he was still allowed to practice in Dallas.

And this was not exactly a small business. In 1956, his gross annual income was estimated at $1.5 million, and he saw more than 8,000 patients that year. Now, since... Yeah, it's too many. 8,000. It's so many. That's...

Yeah, it's cool. It's pretty cool, really. It's good. It's good and it rules. It's God. We're all doomed. We are doomed, Billy. We are doomed. I have fun with it, though.

Yeah. So since he could no longer ship out of state, he launched a massive advertising campaign to convince Americans to travel to lovely Dallas for their cancer treatment. He used passages from the trial testimony as advertisements, publishing them in popular magazines. He hired shady doctors from around the country, a mix of quacks and real doctors who needed money, and he got positive quotes from them, which he also published.

Hoxie embarked on a nationwide lecture campaign, applying audiences with lines like this. There's only one way they'll ever close that Hoxie clinic, and that's to put a militia around it. Ah! Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing. He was so made for the 21st century.

He would have done incredible on Facebook. Yeah, he really would have. Oh, my God. Yeah. He would have been fucking Donald Trump's like... Fuckin', what do you call the attorney general? Yes. Or not attorney general.

Surgeon general. What's the medical one? Surgeon general. Yeah, his face would be on cigarette packs going like, these are cool. Absolutely. These are the good cigarettes, because I get a cut. Exactly.

Exactly. They're called health sticks. Yeah. Hoxie also hired a ghost writer to publish his autobiography with a wonderful title, You Don't Have to Die. That is a good title. That's a good title,

because a lot of people are terrified of that. Yeah, it's a great title. Now, this, the publication of this book in 1956 is when he started claiming that his grandfather had come up with the herbal mixture at the center of his treatment. This is also when he started denying that his father, who had died of cancer, had died of cancer. Instead, he began to claim that the AMA had written out

a fake death certificate to hide the fact that his dad had really just died of an infection. Man, that is... Yeah. There's layers going on there. The battle he was waging against mainstream real medicine was at the center of everything Harry Hoxie did. He claimed that his father's deathbed handover of the recipe

for his magical salve had included the warning, they will persecute you, slander you, and try to drive you off the face of the earth. And, excluding the word slander, this would wind up being true. And in part two, we will talk about how Harry Hoxie was finally driven off the face of the earth, or at least off the face of the United States,

because Billy, I'm going to give you one hint as to where tomorrow's episode's going. Hmm. Is it south? South of the border, down Mexico way. It's their calling. It's where it has to end.

It's the only place it could go. Once I stood, before I even knew where this ended, when I read fake cancer cure, I said, we're probably going to wind up in Rosarito at some point, aren't we? I was just trying to remember the name of the town. There's a couple of them. You know, the whole Baja Peninsula

is a great place to do that work. Yes, it's pretty. It is. It's a great, I love it. I love it, but it is ironic to me that we have referenced, for a show with the goal that our show has, of talking about the worst people in all of history, the single town most commonly referenced in the show

is not Berlin, it's not Moscow, it's not even Washington D.C., it's fucking Tijuana. Yes. I could do it there. That's so good. But this is the end of the episode. Billy, you got some pluggables to plug.

Yes, when is this coming out? God only knows. Okay, I'm touring a bunch. bwdtour.com, I'll be in... I'm going to guess start of March, probably, maybe. Okay, perfect. February. Tulsa, I'll be in Wichita, Tulsa, Oklahoma City,

Nashville, Seattle again in April. Just go to bwdtour.com. Go to bwdtour.com. Thanks, guys. And you can find me on the internet somewhere, presumably, but the secrets have been lost to time. That's the episode. You can actually find him at iRiteOK on Twitter.

You can find us at Bastard's Pod on Twitter and Instagram. We have a tea public store. Robert also co-hosts Worst Your Ever with Katie Stoll and Cody Johnston. And if you got your tickets to see Billy and Robert, Dynasty Typewriter on March 8th. Yay. Yep, and, you know, if you want to take to Twitter

to give me shit for making Sophie do all the work at the end of the episode, that's fair, but I'm not going to change my ways. Never. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.