The King of Quacks
Near Zzyzx, California
For decades, Curtis Howe Springer told the world he was a doctor. He claimed degrees in medicine and osteopathy, said he had trained at prestigious institutions, and styled himself a healer. Almost none of it was true.
As far back as the mid nineteen thirties, the Journal of the American Medical Association ran an article titled A Quack and His Nostrums, reporting that a thorough search failed to show that Springer had ever graduated from any reputable college or university, medical or otherwise. The schools he named turned out to be fictional or invented. Yet his radio empire only grew, and so did the complaints.
Investigators eventually pursued him over false advertising and misrepresentation over the health claims he made for his tonics. In nineteen sixty-nine, the American Medical Association gave him a title that stuck for the rest of his life. They called him the King of Quacks.
Springer, for his part, seemed almost proud of the notoriety, embracing his role as the last of the old-time medicine men. He kept preaching, kept selling, and kept broadcasting from the desert, right up until the government finally came for the land itself.
