Next up on the essays shelf:
A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing
Often, when writers get angry, they lose their sense of humor. I suppose that is true for non-writers too. The real comedians of the world are those who take their anger and turn it into something that makes the rest of us guffaw. It’s a gift. Think about how pissed off George Carlin was about stuff. Or Richard Pryor. Or Chris Rock. Comedy isn’t only about anger (Bill Cosby didn’t seem to operate from anger, and that guy was funny), but I so admire those who see something, get ENRAGED about it, and then are able to discuss it in a way that both points up the absurdity and also helps us all let off a little bit of steam about it. H.L. Mencken is that kind of writer. He can barely write one sentence without betraying some sense of irritation about this or that ridiculous situation/institution. (This is also not entirely true: His essays on the composers he loves, as well as the authors, are the nearest he gets to fanboy ravings, and I love it when he is in the mood to Praise. Soak it up, it won’t last long!)
Mencken, who put this collection together himself, grouped essays of similar topics under headings such as “Science”, “Pedagogy”, “Criticism”, “Literati”, “American Statesmen”, etc. He has one section titled “Quackery”, of which this essay, on chiropractors, is included. Also under “Quackery” is an essay about Christian Science, about Comstock, and one hilarious essay entitled “Hooey From the Orient”. Lots of things pissed Mencken off, but one thing – which courses through all of his essays like a powerful river – is a hatred of those who peddle nonsense to unsuspecting believing citizens. He can’t stand palm readers, he has a contempt for Freudian thought (although he does not throw out the business of “psychology” altogether) – he hates FADS. He can’t stand those who offer up quick-fix cure-alls. He thinks the American public is too credulous, obviously, but he thinks those who seek to take advantage of said credulity are charlatans. I certainly don’t disagree. On the flip side, he seems to think that the idiots need to be weeded out of our society, and perhaps Quackery was a good way to do it. Mencken is nothing if not rude.
I’m fascinated by quackery myself. Listen, I TRIED to get recruited by a certain cult, just so I could see how far into it I could get, and how their brainwashing tactics actually worked. I am stupidly brave.
But chiropractors, Henry? Why are you SO ANGRY about them? His anger seethes on the page and makes this one of his most uproariously funny pieces.
I was a stress ball of manic energy while living in Chicago, and I also was running up to 10 miles almost every day. My body was a va-va-voom Mack truck of muscle. I started getting pinched nerves in my neck, where I would wake up and be unable to move, and would end up hunched over in a frozen position of agony. I found a chiropractor, and had weekly appointments for about a month, where he snapped me, cracked me, pulled me, yanked me about. I always felt so much better when I left the guy’s office. Perhaps I had succumbed to quackery. Perhaps I should have been meditating or practicing Hooey from the Orient. I remember, too, that the guy I was seeing at the time, who has starred in many a story posted on my site, also had back problems, and one day it got so bad (and he refused to seek help, of course), I turned Chirpractor on his ass, and pummeled him within an inch of his life. I WALKED on his back. He said he felt better. I’m a proud Quack.
I have no knowledge other than anecdotal and I don’t feel like doing the necessary research. Is there evidence that chiropractic works? I mean, like peer review studies and the like? Do actual medical doctors look down on chiropractors? I would imagine yes. And what is the certification process? How do you keep out frauds and racketeers? Is there any review process? Mencken wrote this essay in the 1920s, when phenomenon like traveling snake-oil salesmen was still current, and they were still going about peddling little bottles of magic medicine to unsuspecting and desperate citizens. He lumped chiropractic in with that racket.
And while this entire essay is devoted to chiropractic, he never misses a chance to throw a jeer their way. They are common punching bags to Mencken, he uses them as a smear tactic often.
Why this essay is so funny to me is not because I agree and think, “YEAH, you tell ’em, Henry!” I have no opinion one way or the other. Why it is funny is his use of language, which again gets into that Joseph Heller territory I’ve mentioned (or, more accurately, Heller clearly knew his Mencken and used this style, particularly in Catch-22, with its accumulation of absurdities, in every. single. sentence.) Mencken sets up the joke early on. Chiropractors always started as something else, guys who were big, strong, and worked manual labor. Mencken keeps that joke going throughout, and it gets increasingly funny every time he uses it. So a chiropractor is an “ex-boilermaker”, just one example of MANY throughout. The professions he chooses for these punch-lines are hilarious, albeit mean (or hilarious BECAUSE mean), and it is the accumulation of them that makes the joke. “shaved and fumigated longshoreman”. I mean, come on.
The first time I read this essay I literally had to put the book down and HOWL with laughter.
Your mileage may vary, and I honestly don’t care. I treasure those who make me laugh, even when they make me laugh by railing about chiropractors of all things.
Here is an excerpt.
A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing
I repeat that it eases and soothes me to see them so prosperous, for they counteract the evil work of the so-called science of public hygienic, which now seeks to make imbeciles immortal. If a man, being ill of a pus appendix, resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshoreman to have it disposed of, and submits willingly to a treatment involving balancing him on McBurney’s spot and playing on his vertebrae as a concertina, then I am willing, for one, to believe that he is badly wanted in Heaven. And if that same man, having achieved lawfully a lovely babe, hires a blacksmith to cure its diphtheria by pulling its neck, then I do not resist the divine will that there shall be one less radio fan later on. In such matters, I am convinced, the laws of nature are far better guides than the fiats and machinations of medical busybodies. If the latter gentlemen had their way, death, save at the hands of the hangmen, policemen and other such legalized assassins, would be abolished altogether, and the present differential in favor of the enlightened would disappear. I can’t convince myself that that would work any good to the world. On the contrary, it seems to me that the current coddling of the half-witted should be stopped before it goes too far – if, indeed, it has not gone too far already. To that end nothing operates more cheaply and effectively than the prosperity of quacks. Every time a bottle of cancer oil goes through the mails Homo americanus is improved to that extent. And every time a chiropractor spits on his hands and proceeds to treat a gastric ulcer by stretching the backbone the same high end is achieved.
But chiropractic, of course, is not perfect. It has superb potentialities, but only too often they are not converted into concrete cadavers. The hygienists rescue many of its foreordained customers, and, turning them over to agents of the Medical Trust, maintained at the public expense, get them cured. Moreover, chiropractic itself is not certainly fatal: even an Iowan with diabetes may survive its embraces. Yet worse, I have a suspicion that it sometimes actually cures. For all I know (or any orthodox pathologist seems to know) it may be true that certain malaises are caused by the pressure of vagrom vertebrae upon the spinal nerves. And it may be true that a hearty ex-boilermaker, by a vigorous yanking and kneading, may be able to relieve that pressure. What is needed is a scientific inquiry into the matter, under rigid test conditions, by a committee of men learned in the architecture and plumbing of the body, and of a high and incorruptible sagacity. Let a thousand patients be selected, let a gang of selected chiropractors examine their backbones and determine what is the matter with them, and then let these diagnoses be checked up by the exact methods of scientific medicine. Then let the same chiropractors essay to cure the patients whose maladies have been determined. My guess is that the chiropractors’ errors in diagnosis will run to at least 95%, and that their failures in treatment will push 99%. But I am willing to be convinced.
