Part One: The Founding Father of Fake Cancer Cures

Robert is joined by Billy Wayne Davis to discuss Harry Hoxsey, the fake Cancer-Curing Alex Jones of the 1950s!

FOOTNOTES:

1. Cancer War: The FDA Vs. Harry Hoxsey
2. HOXSEY, HARRY M.
3. The Medical Messiahs: Chapter 17
4. The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery 
5. Nature Doctors
6. The History of The Hoxsey Formula in Cancer Support
7. Hoxsey Herbal Therapy
8. Carrying their last hopes, ill Americans cross border

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
H what it'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? Yeah,
everybody loves a good metastasization. It's a great word. Um,

(00:23):
one of my favorites. It's billy satisfying. You're Billy Wayne Davis.
Depending on who's asking the question, yes, yes, yes, there
are no lawmen in the room, so you are Billy
Wayne Davis. How you doing, Billy? I'm good. Do you
have any exciting plans for I don't know, roughly like

(00:43):
two weeks from now, dish, a little more like three
sound like a Sunday? I do someday somewhere between two
and three weeks from now, in a city somewhere between
Phoenix and San Francisco. I'll be specific plans. Yeah, this
is all line enough. Yeah, this episode was supposed to

(01:06):
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. It's the whatsoever. There's no work, no,
and I 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 like

(01:29):
like hardcore negging, like aggressively, yeah, like really really aggressively.
Speaking of aggressive, Billie, Yes, how do you feel about cancer?
I don't like it. Not a fan, huh, not a
cancer stand overall now over overall. But there's some upsides.
I can't you know, you can't say there's not everything.

(01:53):
So there are. Yeah, every now and then the right
person gets cancer, and I don't want to disregard, you know,
I'm I'm very much a mos death fear, not of
man because men die sort of guy, like like, who's
the most recent guy who died of cancer? Who sucked? Uh? Well,
I say, Limball just got it exactly. Like people are like, okay,

(02:14):
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 is like a drunk
redneck with like a short barrel a R fifteen, with
one of those two and forty round drums. He doesn't
often hit what he's aiming at, but every now and
then he does. Great is a terrible and great analogy

(02:37):
of this. So I don't know. In all seriousness, cancer
is a big pile of ass um and it's unfortunately
one of those asses that medical science is not as
equipped to kick as we might like. Um. And despite
the wonderful advances in medicine over the last century, thousands
of people every year wind up in the nightmare situation
of having some doctor tell them I'm sorry, but there's

(02:58):
just nothing we can do. Uh and he and more
people wind up in the position of a doctor saying
we can beat this, but the treatment's really gonna 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

(03:18):
then opportunity, it's just, well, that wasn't a word I
was thinking about, Okay, m hm. 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 we'll be doing
some episodes in the near future talk about black save
and all these other terrible things that people sell on

(03:39):
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 Hoxy Now haven't. I would
remember that name too. Yeah. H O x s E

(03:59):
y um. Yeah. So Harry Haxy might be the guy,
might be the greatest of the cancer con men. And
that's that's what we're gonna talk about. His business card,
Harry Cancer. Yeah, kinds of god man. Yeah, okay, you cancer,
but not really that. I'm not going to Harry M. Hoxie. Uh,

(04:21):
the M stands for metastasize was born on October twenty three,
nineteen o one, Auburn, Illinois. So we're already off to
a bad start, just in the middle of nothing, the
middle of goddamn. And I fucking spent some early years
in Glenn Carbon, so I can say that about Illinois.
It's nothing, nothing, nothing. He was the youngest of twelve children,

(04:41):
and we do not know much about his parents, really,
but we can safely assume that they loved to fuck,
that they like to fun. Because you don't get brand
every time, No, and you don't get twelve kids who
won't make it out of that hole alive in that
day and age without like really, yeah, you put in
the time exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Harry's father, John owned

(05:08):
a livery stable which was essentially the gas station of
the day, and he also worked as a veterinary surgeon. Uh,
this did not does not mean that he was a
station surgeon. Where do you where do you take your horse?
Owns a gas station because brain surgery on horses it's

(05:29):
actually worse than that. Um 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 eighteen seventy seven. So in eighteen seventy seven, 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

(05:50):
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 better a 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 eighteen
seventy seven. They're like, yeah, you can keep saying it.
You keep saying you're a doctor. Yeah, okay, this is

(06:15):
easier than arguing with all of you guys. Yeah, we'll
just let you keep being fake doctors. Compromises, the assess
is the undergirding of democracy, Billy, it is it so?
Harry Hawksey's dad was not a doctor, but got to
keep pretending to be a veterinary doctor because he'd been

(06:36):
doing it for so long, um, even though his qualifications
didn't really extend far beyond having a saw. Now it's okay.
It is an interesting position where you can't say you're
a doctor anymore. I'm like, I've been being a doctor
for a long time. I've been who says I'm not
a doctor? All You've been saying it so long. All

(06:56):
these people say they call me doc. So I feel
I said, I haven't said as a doctor about as
a long time as it will take to get a
medical degree. You've killed a lot of people, well, but
most of them was horses. He's got a point. Just
let him make this just there's like so many counties
we have to go to. It's just yeah, that's that's

(07:19):
general basically how it worked out. So Haxey's dad, John
was a was a veterinarian, but not really but legally
he was. And decades later, in the nineteen fifties, Hawxey
would claim that his family's knowledge of the healing arts
went back even further. He started to claim that in
eighteen forty, his grandfather, John Haxey, a horse breeder, had
a price stallion that developed a huge cancerous lesion. John

(07:42):
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. Into John's shock, the animal healed. Oh wow, okay, yeah,
and this is this is not impossible. There are cases
in scientific literature of animals king out medicinal herbs on
their own to to to deal with problems. It does happen.

(08:05):
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 sense. That's that's the key
to good medicine. I mean if someone was pitching that
to me and they were like horse sense, so okay,
go on, okay, you can keep here. Yes see see

(08:29):
Billy and Doctor Horse, the hit Netflix uh mini series
coming to your streaming service. Until he looks at some
grass and I'm like hate that. Yeah, the horses just
squeezing on a baster to shoot bleach up people's assholes.
I didn't do it, the horse did it. Yeah. Ain't

(08:53):
no law that says a horse can't illegally practice bleach medicine.
So uh. John Haxey Senior UH turns this horse sense
medicine into a salve and he starts using it on
all of his other sick animals. Uh. And over the years,
that make sense? Yea that does that does track? Uh?

(09:16):
And over the years he found it was very effective
at treating cancer, sores, and other illnesses and his herd.
His salve was so effective that other people began seeking
out his help for their sick animals, and that Harry
Haxey would later claim is how his dad ended up
as a vet. So, I mean, it is just the
most farma bullshit you've ever heard. Though aspects of its

(09:37):
scan say that aspects of it scan yes, yeh many
of tobacco spit was put on my like that and
it worked. I don't know how they know there is.
Actually tobacco has medicinal benefits. Native Americans used it to
keep away certain insects for thousands of years, and it

(09:59):
can be used and nets, although tobacco spits not the
ideal way to do that. Yeah, as I got older,
I was like, you could have just used the tobacco.
I think, yeah you could. Yeah you did that 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 more fun. It's a it's
a fun or delivery device. It is. They're not wrong

(10:21):
about everything. 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

(10:42):
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
his horse cancer and will cure what I'm pretty sure
is his people cancer. For years, the Haxey successfully cured

(11:02):
all kinds of cancers with the magic of horse science,
until John Haxey died in nineteen nineteen. As the story goes,
on his deathbed, Harry's father gave him the recipe for
making the special family save. He told his son, now
you have the power to heal the sick and save lives.
Why he did that on the deathbed? Yeah, at the end,

(11:23):
he was like, yeah, right at the end, here's the
ticket to saving all mankind with the sad Yep, you
wait until your death bed for that one spoons Is
that table is a table? Is it? God? Damn it?

(11:45):
This is obviously obviously alive. It's a blatant yeah, big
like that. That's when I'm like, well, ah, yeah, we'll
get into why exactly this like how this like him
about 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.

(12:07):
Before publishing his biography You Don't Have to Die in
nineteen fifty six, Harry claimed that his father had developed
the sav on his own in nineteen oh late. The
versions of the story Harry told also tended to leave
out the critical fact of how his father died cancer. Yeah,
his mother also died of cancer in n Now horse cancer,

(12:30):
not horse cancer. 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 carrying cancer. Yes, yes,

(12:55):
you're not gonna have any magical cancer cures. Then I
mean power market's going to really exist. Mm hmm, yeah,
very fair, think of small business owners like Harry Haxey. Now,
the reality of Harry's back stories seems to be that
he quit school at age fifteen and started working as
a coal miner. He later moved on to selling insurance.

(13:25):
That is a good leap, that is a good right
into a desk job. Yeah, that's the steps the change.
You want to know, my next job is not going
to be this. Uh. 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

(13:46):
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 nineteen twenty two, the year
after his mother's death. So, I mean, do you think
it is like teenage rebellion? He's like, I ain't going
into bullshit, and like, yeah, I'm going into real work.
And then you went and did real work and he's like, man, bullshit,

(14:09):
I see why dad has a fake cancer here. You know. Yeah,
you must have tried real work one time too. You know.
I'm gonna be honest if if if there's one thing
having a podcast it's taught me, it's that I probably
could have had a fake cancer cre in the nineteen
hundreds and made a good living. And if it had
been a choice between coal mining or fake cancer here,

(14:31):
I probably would have been a fake cancer doctor. I
come to be honest with you, and I'm a stand
up comedian because I think people are like, oh, yeah,
do you not know how I was like, no, I
know how to do all that stuff. I just I
choosed to be a stand up comedian. Yeah. Uh so,

(14:53):
I bet you're wondering. What was the inciting incident that
brought Harry Haxey 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

(15:13):
gonna give you one guess as to which side of
the warrior wound up on. This veteran found Harry. There's
no there was no one, which it never always not
even a question. No, he's wearing a specific shade of gray. Yes,
I know. Uh. Now, this Civil War veteran found Harry

(15:34):
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.

(15:54):
If I was drowning, would you stand by and watch
me go down? Because a sign on yonder tree says
no swimming loud fucking bulletproof logic. If it depends on
if I knew you were not, I mean, it's like, yeah, actually,
most professionals will say you shouldn't, just if you don't
have training swim in there after a dress. So why

(16:15):
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

(16:37):
set right to using his magical horse medicine on the
dying veterans 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
Hoxey's formula. Now, the actual formula that he used throughout
his career varied constantly and included why differences. One of

(17:01):
the versions of it included like this, I think was
blood root is the name, which is like it's a
it's a similar kind of compound to what you would
put on a wart. You know, you put those those
like cells that and it will burn the word off.
So one of the different formulations of the sav was that,
and that's sort of a compound can work on skin cancers.
Sometimes it usually doesn't, and it's generally so like the

(17:25):
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 es erotic compound like that can burn

(17:46):
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 nineteen and dot like
said was cancer. This guy burned it off, and the
guy was like he carried me, and the doctors like, whoa,
that's cancer. Yeah. Now, the most common recipe in the
modern day you will see given for Haxey's formula is

(18:08):
a mix of liquorice, red clover, burdock roots, tollingia root,
barbary kascara, 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 eight So whatever debatable health properties you want

(18:30):
to attribute to Haxey's 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 funk he wanted most of the time. Yeah. Yeah,
in the sales mode, went into sales mode. It was
all about the sales to Haxey as opposed to like
what he was actually selling, because that varied over the years.

(18:50):
So do you think his dad believed in it? And
he was just more of like a I am. I
am not convinced his dad ever had any kind of
cancer or save. I think he made that up to.
But it's possible you think his dad was No, you
think he made up that his dad did it. Yeah,
Like I I fucking make a medicinal salve that I

(19:10):
have given away to a couple of friends over the
years for like it's good for, Like you know, we've
used it for um, like dogs that have like a
raw spot on them to stop them from gnawing on it,
and like it's good for it's got stuff like everything
in it is something that like I can point to
double blind studies that have been conducted and show that
like plantago major does this or like and like that
was even more common back in the day. Like you
live out in the middle of nowhere, there's no fucking doctors.

(19:32):
Everybody's got some weird little remedy they use. So it's
entirely possible that Hoxey'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 tour
to like who knows what happened. Any number of things
could have occurred. As we'll get into what matters is
less what has he was using to cure cancer and

(19:55):
more how Haxy marketed his cancer cure that did not
cure cancer. And I want to make that to be clear. Yeah. So,
after quote unquote curing his first patient, Hawksy 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 save for some unknown reason, the Chicago men

(20:16):
backed out very quickly, and Hawksy alone expanded his operations
into the hawk Side Institute, which he launched in the
town of Taylorville. Now, these facilities were the old headquarters
of the Order of the Moose, which is Bilian. I
just gave it to the look like hawks Side and

(20:37):
then you said moves And now can't you know it's
economy And I I know Illinois is technically part of
the Midwest. You know, we're kind of right on right
right in that Mason Dixon Lion area. But I'm going

(20:58):
to declare it part of the South just based on
this story for sure, like from like Peoria. Yeah, once
you get yeah, yeah, the southern part of Illinois. Yeah,
I mean you damn near Missouri. Yeah, so, yeah, the
fucking Order of the Moose. So he sets up his

(21:20):
headquarters in the Old Order of the Moose building, which
he buys with the help of unnamed businessmen in town
who he convinced somehow to give him a pile of money. Now,
Hawxy began publishing advertisements for the Hawks Side Institute. Next uh.
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

(21:41):
that have been affected and are now being affected at
Taylorville under strictly ethical methemetical supervision, painlessly, without operation, and
with permanent results. Those are Yeah, strictly ethical. We gotta
we gotta emphasize that. No, that doesn't make alarm bills
go off when you have to say that in your pitch.
This is ethical. This is strictly ethical. Yeah, why would

(22:04):
it not. 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 combat them. It makes me
trust them. 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

(22:26):
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

(22:46):
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 were yeah, giving him like acid. Yeah,
that's that's what I was saying. One of the formulations
of the salve that Hawksy used was basically, it's very

(23:07):
similar to this stuff black salve that you see sold
all over like Facebook and ship today. Um, 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's it's it

(23:27):
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. Like it's some Uh, it's like,
you know, an amputation can potentially be a necessary medical treatment.

(23:49):
If you use it for every potential illness, you're not
helping anything. This is that off like you know, you
think about like a lot of this uff like goes
back to ancient Native American remedies. And if you're in
fucking the year b C and you've got a skin cancer, yeah,
this like this has something like this, we'll give you

(24:10):
a better shot at survival than fucking nothing. Right, 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,

(24:31):
it's cool. Yeah, stuff 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 down don't we should?
Should we meet up about that? Yeah? Should we should?

(24:51):
There be a thing we do when people start melting skulls.
As a medical professional, that's not good. Now. It is
nineteen twenty four and none of us are good at
being doctors. But I feel like this is worse all
of us that have the loss and should be able
to agree now to keep the secret of his medicine. Uh,

(25:16):
the doctor said. Hoxy bought the separate ingredients, each at
a different drug store. The key ingredient analysis at a
m A headquarters revealed was arsenic, as Hoxey's vaunted remedy
was an escherrotic, a corrosive chemical that ate away the
flesh through the ages. Physicians had employed such corrosive agents
and treating external cancers, but this modive procedure had become outmoded.
Pasts went out with the bustle. AT Cancer Authority has

(25:38):
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 rotic 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.

(25:59):
You know what's even for more certain than surgery, Billy, Wayne, Yeah,
it is the products and services that support this podcast,
And I feel like the f d A 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 would put my name on that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely,

(26:23):
well yes, maybe yeah, yeah, no, I will put Billy's
name on that. To put my name on it, put
a version of my name, Billy's name is offering. Yes,
reverend doctor billionaire Wayne Davis. Yes, billionaire billionaire Wayne Davis

(26:48):
well helped make Billy a billionaire by purchasing products from
companies that are unrelated to him. Services. We're back and
we are talking about Harry Hawxy's Burn your Face Off
clinic uh in Taylorville, Illinois. UM. Now the A M

(27:11):
A did not take all this sitting down. One doctor
wrote a scathing report on the Hawk Side Institute in
the m A Journal, writing that tragedy would be fall
cancer sufferers who are beguiled by the false beacons of
the Hawk Side University, the promoters of the scheme. He wrote,
we're reaping a rich harvest from gullibility and suffering, which
is very well worded accurate. Now, Haxey responded in the

(27:34):
way of all true experts charlatan's. He sued the A
m A for libel and demanded a quarter of a
million dollars. Yeah, and I have to say, we're gonna
talk about this later. This is the first time someone's
really done this. Um that like one of these medical
charlatan's has taken the fight to the people trying to
bust him in like an organized way, and he will

(27:55):
He will continue too. He's not really the like like
um Goatball doctor who we will also talk about later
is kind of doing this. You know, it is similar
time frame frame, but Hoxy 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 pioneering. Everything

(28:21):
needs a pioneer. That's the pioneering is always good. Doesn't
matter what you are, you should be rewarded for being
the first. I'm gonna be the pioneer just chopping off
cancerous lesions real fucking fast with the machete. That you're
not even the first that's done that, but I'll be
a guest of this podcast has taught me I will
not be the first, but I will be the fastest

(28:43):
and the drunkest, and that's something to be proud of. Yeah,
there's actually no way I will beat the drunk if
all the correct No, you won't. No, I I if
I can walk, I won't be as drunk as the
average doctor in eighteen thirty eight or any of the
Founding fathers or any of the Founding fathers. Oh god.

(29:06):
So the case spent several years wandering through the courts
before the a m A finally insisted it go to trial,
and this seems to have been them calling Haxey's bluff.
He did never want the court the 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 A. M. A Was like, no,
let's fucking go to court. Um. He was kind of

(29:27):
shocked to wind up in court. Uh. 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 Toxie by the family of one
of his dead patients. So, accused of practicing medicine without
a license, Harry pled guilty and received a hundred dollar fine.

(29:50):
This would be one of dozens of convictions for practicing
medicine without a license. Huh what that's all he got? Yeah,
hundred dollar. I mean it's a lot of back then,
it's not yeah, yeah, yeah, it's more money than but
it is. You're right, absolutely not enough to stop him

(30:12):
from his behavior, or he doesn't even slow him down. No, no,
you don't have to pay it. Yeah. I mean you
could say it does have an impact because he's forced
to close the Hawkside Institute in nine after just four years,
So like you could argue, you know it it did something, Um,
but it did not stop Harry's dream of curing cancer

(30:33):
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 into
letting him celebrate his return home with hawksy day, a
Fourth of July like celebration from the town band, playing
in a small crowd of grateful patients giving their loud testimonials.

(30:55):
A fellow he does have moxie. He does, if only
he had actually been selling moxie, which is of course
a mixture of M I P T and M D
M A. That is a delightful way to spend an evening. Um, okay,
I'll take okay, Yeah, it's it fucking rules. Um yeah.

(31:19):
So a fellow who is described in the literature as
an eclectic doctor from Indiana praised Hoxy sav well that's
what they called Larry Bird to eclectic doctor, the eclectic
doctor from Indiana, And a local minister delivered a speech
that praised Harry. Hoxy is a figure of near religious character.

(31:39):
I love my country because it's 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,
it is a good speech, and it's just God. If

(32:01):
you just get a good performer. Mm hmm, there's it's
all you need. It really is. It's remarkable. Yeah, and
just just don't get too full of yourself. You could
do that forever. Yeah. Now, with this preamble complete, Haxey
took up the stage to address his once and future neighbors.
Quote from hoxy there is a lot of knockers who

(32:24):
do not know what they're talking about, and especially around
a man's hometown. If those knockers are here today and
have the mind of a six year old child, and
don't leave here today a walking talking died on the
wool hawxy fan and convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that
this treatment is a cure for cancer. They are either deaf, dumb,
bow blind, or else they are crazy. I'm not going
to say that word, not not with my accent. No,

(32:48):
I'm not gonna say kno. Oh, yeah, you know what.
I love my career and my children, you know what
I mean. Yeah, yeah, as soon as yeah, sitting this out,
I'm fun playing, I'll be over here. After warming up
the crowd with some random insults, Haxy zeroed in on
attacking the medical establishment, declaring so called real doctors with

(33:10):
licenses hardhearted and only interested in having their hand greased
with plenty of money so they could buy fancy cars.
He noted that he had invited the AMA to this rally,
but that they refused to attend. Why don't they fighting
the open, Why don't they take this platform? Why don't
they prove the hacksy affairs as fake as they say?
Doctors curing theme? Why won't you come to my parade

(33:35):
and tell me my burning treatment? Don't care cancer? Say
it to my face, Say it to my face, Say
it to these dead people's burnt off faces. You gotta
work hard to find what's left to the faces, but
it's in there there. Say it to Yeah, you're gonna
have to shout it because of the years in the burning.

(33:55):
But there's no care now. The A m. A was,
in fact, are of all this, But letters written internally
at the time show they basically concluded that the best
thing to do was let Haxey 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 a Haxey soon found himself

(34:17):
fleeing Gerard Andy Griffith approach to it. Yeah, this is
exactly how Andy Griffith would handle it. Yeah, that's the
Nanny Griffith. They were like, just it'll get around. He's
burning Beatle's faces, Yeah, he Folks will figure out pretty soon.
They don't, but they ain't. That dumb Barney comes back
in half his face. He's That would be the first

(34:42):
act of the of the episode, this Barney getting his
face burned off, his face back. Yeah. Now. Toxy was
fined twice more in Illinois for practicing medicine without a license.
As an instinctive grifter, Harry Haxey knew exactly two things.
Number one, the key to griff thing is to never
ever admit defeat. And number two, the second key to

(35:04):
grifting is to move somewhere with fewer laws. If the
laws keep getting in the way of your con that's
really that's really everything about drifting 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 what damns
them in the end. But this is not the end.
So very next Haxey moved his cancer clinic to the

(35:27):
Mexico of Illaha. I was like, no, he didn't get no, no, no, no, no,
not yet. He goes to the Mexico of Illinois, which
is of course Iowa. Um, and he teamed up with
another random guy there, another fake doctor he thought he
could cure cancer, and the two work together briefly until
the state of Iowa realized what was going on and
forbade Haxy from treating cancer patients ever again. So actually,

(35:50):
Iowa handles this very well. Um. I just I can't
not make fun of Iowa, and I'm not going to
change deserve it. It's pretty there's not a single state
in this union. And I will not mock except from
Montana because I am frightened of it. Yeah, and it's awesome.
It is awesome. Yeah, it rules. Um that is another reason.

(36:12):
Now this began a period of travel for Harry Hawxy.
He moved to Detroit and then Wheeling, West Virginia. And
then Atlantic City setting up cancer clinics and having them
almost immediately busted. The A m A followed him the
whole way, and he's hard Virginia for any it's a
fucking billy, the kid's hometown, Like, it's hard. It's hard

(36:32):
for those people to be like, hey, come on, we're
West Virginia and you win a step too far for us.
Come on, we we've made it mandatory for six year
olds to carry handguns, but this is a step beyond
what we're comfortable with. Get out of here now. The
A m A followed him the whole way, and he

(36:53):
accumulated convictions for practicing medicine without a license at the
normal rate, and men accumulate twitter suspensions. By nineteen thirty six,
Harry Haxey was tired of getting constantly almost immediately caught
and lost lammed 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

(37:15):
where a medical con man like him could truly thrive.
I'm talking, of course, about Dallas, Texas. Yeah yeah, yeah,
that's scans, Yeah yeah, yeah, it's mostly ego that yeah,
that city. So yeah, yeah, you've met my brother everything

(37:38):
in Dallas, Texas. It's comical. Yeah that 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. Yeah,
this isn't a joke. This is just the truth of Dallas, Texas.
I would say of the crimes I've committed in my
life have been in Dallas, Texas and no consequences. It's

(38:03):
so funny. It's a great tip. It's like Texas Vegas.
You need to do a show in Dallas for all
the reasons that just got list did. Yeah, well, we'll
do a show in Dallas and I'm sure commit a
couple more crimes there. Um. Now, for the actual work

(38:23):
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 Hawksy, you'd
think he'd be able to avoid getting in more trouble

(38:45):
for practicing medicine without a license. But in the great
tradition of medical conman, Harry possessed a deep and uncontrollable
need to really just get his hands in there. You
know they do. You can't stop him. You can't stop
them even when they don't need to, when they're already rich.
They can't do it. They can't. It's the it's the

(39:09):
thing that's most confusing about these guys. Obviously they are
mostly just vile conman who want to make a shipload
of money um 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 there's something else going on. It
is not yeah, I'm with you, because there is that

(39:31):
thing of like I'll fucking do this, fucking fucking fix this,
and I don't. You can't, can't. Can't. Multiple states, You've
gone through like half of them at this point, a
lot of the country. You keep killing. He's like, no,

(39:53):
cancer does He's like, no, you've sped it up. Yeah,
you really really made it faster. But there is something
I also love that every state he goes to there's
like he always teams up with a new person. So
that's that cracks me up because I like to think
of that moment where they both were as like, wait,
you're a full of ship too, I'm a full of

(40:15):
sh it you wanna Yeah? Should we make more money
off of this? Yeah? I don't know. Harry was caught
practicing medicine without a license and find twenty five thou
dollars and given a five month sentence in jail, and
especially compared to his first penalty for practicing medicine without
a license, is a pretty pretty reasonable penalty at least

(40:36):
a good start. Damn. But Harry was still uh. He
was practicing in Texas. Uh. 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, Uh, Harry was

(40:59):
able to avoid a few true issues of getting convicted
of practicing medicine without a license by convincing the American
Natural Pathic Association to award him an honorary doctor of
naturalpath He agree 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 ten

(41:20):
dollar donations to the association. It may have been that easy.
I don't know. Um, it may have been that easy.
Judging by his background. He is that clever where he
was like, what is this Tim Bucks ship? Yeah, a

(41:41):
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 thirties
and forties starting to grow into a thing. So they
might have reached out to him because he was so prominent.
I really don't know. Um. Now at this point, though,
we should talk a little bit about natural apathy. Uh.

(42:01):
The term was coined by a guy named John Sheel
in eighteen ninety five, and John sold this word to
the father of natural apathy, a man named Benedict Lust.
All their lust, Yeah, it's amazing. Benedict Lust used the
word natural apathy, which he hit again purchased to found

(42:23):
the word. The American School of Natural Apathy in nineteen
o one. This was reorganized in nineteen nineteen as the
American Natural Pathic Association. It grew rapidly up into the
nineteen thirties. Most states at this point we're not willing
to grant natural paths licenses, and so at first the
only licensed natural pathic doctors were either in England or
in the American West. Even after natural apathy suffered its

(42:46):
first collapse as a discipline in the nineteen forties, it
remained incredibly prevalent in the Pacific Northwest, and it is
today this time still a big deal. And at this
time the Southwest is like the heart of the natural
apathy movement, and says has a hell of a lot
of these people. So modern natural apathy is not a
subject within the bounds of this episodes, and it's changed

(43:08):
what it means over the years a fair amount. But
in the nineteen thirties and in Texas, the term basically
meant a doctor who doesn't want to follow all those
rules other doctors follow, which is your right. Texas is
a perfect place for the it's perfect place. Oh god,
he's right, Yeah, you're right, it's perfect. One of the
things about being a Southerner is. And one of the

(43:30):
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, like, what
I love about the South is this like attitude of like,
leave me the funk alone, do not tell me what
to do. I identify with that strongly. I had a
plan to live in the middle of nowhere very soon.

(43:51):
Um I I love that attitude. But it's also the
attitude that gives you nonsense doctors, because it's like nobody
should tell this guy can't burn answer off of people's faces. Yes,
And it's and it takes another person like that to
look and be like no, no, no, that that guy's
full of ship. That's a bad idea. Guys, we shouldn't
be doing this as a as a fuck you kind

(44:13):
of person. That guy's a bad person. Yeah, And it
it's just this kind of thing that like you just
can't trust the free market to sort this ship out
because the free market has no problem with this guy
making a funckload of money lighting people's faces on fire
with acid. Well, free market is trying to make their
own money, so we're not looking at what you're doing.
That's that's why regulation Okay, we're yeah, it's why the

(44:37):
A m A is a good thing to exist, despite
some flaws that it has. Um and especially in this period,
the the A m A is really doing the Lord's
work of trying to stop this ship. So uh, while
hawks he started his Dallas practice, it was this was
right at the time that medicine was in the throes
of what's known as the chemo therapeutic revolution. So chemotherapy

(44:58):
has just become a thing at this point, and it
brought hope to countless cancer sufferers. But chemo, yeah, it
still does. But chemo is also really fucking unpleasant to receive,
and it was even worse than the nineteen thirties. It's
a shitty thing to have to go through, even though
it absolutely does save a huge number of lives. Um.
But horrible stories about painful chemo treatments that had a

(45:19):
lower success rate than they do today helped to drive
new customers to Haxey's practice, where he treated them with
his horse medicine. Um. So yeah, this is you can
see how one feeds into the other and it's not
it's just and what sucks is like these it's not
a lot of dumb dumps going to him. It's just

(45:40):
people that are like, just help, you know, yeah, it
just please help me. And a lot of them are
folks who, like, you know, cancer treatment was even more
primitive a lot on. There are people there probably was
nothing science could do to help them. Um, 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

(46:03):
better than chemotherapy. Yeah, a lot of stuff capitalism therapy, Buddy,
capitalism therapy reduced the the kind you know, a full
wallet is a kind of metastatic tumor, Billy, and capitalistic therapy,

(46:23):
we'll get rid of that tumor in your wallet. It's
time for an ad break services. We're back. So uh.
The early years of Harry Hawxy's wandering practice had involved
him mostly using that pace that burnt off cancers, and

(46:45):
he primarily treated like stuff like those weird like lip
cancers and goiters and weird ship like that that like
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 can Now, part of why
he had a lot of positive testimonials from patients is

(47:06):
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, oh, yeah, I saved your life. I
cured your fucking cancer. It was in Dallas that Hawksy
first began claiming that he could treat internal cancers too,

(47:30):
and this evolution was probably a direct reaction to chemotherapy.
So now chemotherapy is claiming it can treat internal cancers, hacks,
he's gonna start treating okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh so
most of his his his mixtures varied, but most of
them included a mix of water, potassium iodide, which is
generally used to loosen mucus, an herbal actative called cascara sugar,

(47:53):
and a few other herbs. So taking it would absolutely
provoke a physical response, you know, um, which is part
of how people feel like you, 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 shoot
a bunch, they'll feel like they're healing. That is yeah,
I mean that's what a good hangover does too. Absolutely,

(48:13):
I am getting out all those skinny t scams that
influence or that I was just thinking your way to
health that cleans was it you put the he just
it's literally just ship bills. Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah,
where you eat a bunch of or you just drink
a bunch of syrup and ship and that's just you're

(48:34):
just ship your way to better health, flush in 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. Um. Yeah. So he also had a medication
he would give people that was basically just pepto bismal,
which was a common medication at the time. Um Haxy

(48:54):
prescribed to deal 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 gonna quote again
from the book The Medical Messiahs. Why has colored mixtures
cured cancer? Hoxey and his spokesmen 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,

(49:17):
and facilities for objective study. His hypothesis and its bluntest version,
held that a major chemical and balance 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 Haxey's medical director, into
a complicated fantasy of irrelevant scientific and pseudoscientific jargon that

(49:42):
sounded very impressive to the layman, but it caused genuine
cancer experts to grieve. That makes things worse, as the
experts assessed, Yeah, just to grieve, think that they felt
like something just die. Yeah, they're god. This is what
what made things worse, as the experts assessed to Haxey theories,

(50:03):
was that the haxy literature condemned the only treatments yet
found valid in cancer therapy. And I really want to
emphasize here what a pioneering grifter Harry Haxey was Generations
of Snake oil salesman, 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. Haxey only promised

(50:25):
a better than fifty percent 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. Hoxey's whole marketing strategy pivoted around a
ship talking real medicine rather than talking up his fake medicine.
So that's cool, Wow, Yeah, he's he's a genius. He

(50:48):
I mean, you're not wrong, but he doesn't use his
powers for good. It's no, yeah, I mean it'd be
one thing if if he wasn't try on a discredit
credible science, but then he wouldn't be successful. Yeah, I guess. So. Yeah.

(51:10):
It's it's like you look at right now, Uh why
alternative medicine and goop and all this ship is more
is like the biggest it's been in decades as an industry.
It's because this fucking it's because like Facebook and Ship
have spread this welter of propaganda that has people less
trusting of modern medical science than they ever have been,

(51:30):
and other ship plays into that the fact that we
don't have universal health care, the fact that so like
people are like going broke trying to get treated, and
like the whole medical system is this very unfriendly mess
to get into, and like all of the scammers are
very friendly and nice, and like all these different Facebook
support groups, people share their stories about using bullshit medicine
to treat themselves like and attack mainstream medicine at the

(51:53):
same time. Like it's all Harry Haxy is like 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,

(52:13):
just like you're telling at all those factors, so you're
like you look at all of the command your X
oh yes see where it's just a fucking field for
this mm hmm. Great stuff. So part of how Harry
Hawksy did this was by having his own medical professionals
write papers and studies, lambasting the mainstream medical uh industry
or whatever you wanna call it. His own medical director, J. B. Dirky,

(52:37):
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 Dirky'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

(52:58):
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 Haxey's clinic would have felt very
similar to a visit with their normal doctor. And this
was another of Haxey's great innovations, alternative medicine that looked

(53:22):
from the outside just like regular medicine. And it is
this weird situation where like you have to convince people
that regular doctors are full of ship and trying to
scam them. But you also, the more like a regular
doctor's office, your office feels, the more successful your kind
is going to be. Took a church that opens a
coffee shop exactly like a church that hey man, he lost, Yeah,

(53:48):
i am lost. I am lost inside inside, here's the
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 a hundred percent
of cases. External cancers were treated with burning agents. Internal
cancers were giving all sorts of weird liquids alongside a

(54:09):
course of vitamins, laxatives, and and acids. Once the treatment
was prescribed, the patient was taken to Haxey's business manager.
The standard fee started at three hundred dollars, which was
about fifty five hundred dollars in modern money. God, yeah,
it's a good racket, man, it is a good racket.
This worked extremely well, and soon Hawxy was making bank.

(54:31):
The whole thing would have looked pretty reputable to most
observers at the time. He only claimed around a fifty
to sixty 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 Hawxy decided he had to innovate one

(54:52):
more time by doing something no medical grifter had ever
done before. He attempted to get Congress on his side. No,
I thought you were going to say, he is gonna
raise someone from the dead. None that. Yeah. In nineteen
forty five, he visited the National Cancer Institute in Washington,

(55:13):
d c. Backed up by three congressmen who were believers
in his therapy. The n c I had been created
in nineteen thirty five 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 n CIS doctors to see if there might be
something to Haxey's treatments. You know, it has always been

(55:38):
corrupt and stupid and mostly stupid, very corrupt, but stupid
is the dominant thing. There's so dumb, so unbelievably dumb.
It's not new when this is the end. This is
how it's always been. They've always been exactly this. Things
have always been exactly this dumb. They're just fast are

(56:00):
now and we just see it way more clear? Yeah
it is, Yeah, 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 someone's brave enough to say it. So, yeah, he

(56:23):
goes to the he gets he goes with these congressmen
to the n c I to like see if there's
in in the doctors. They were like, yeah, well we'll
take a look at your treatments. Why not. Uh, And
I'm gonna quote from the medical messiahs to to 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

(56:45):
investigation and possible testing. When Haxey, the congressman in Toe,
showed up at the Institute, the n CIS director Dr. R. R.
Spencer explained to these criteria the institute, he said, would
be glad to present Haxey'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 fifty cases

(57:07):
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, had
given up as hopeless, and who had then been treated
by Haxey and had survived from three to five years.
Reasonable requirements right, seemingly yeah, And there was no chance
that Haxey was going to provide any of this. He

(57:29):
did send the n c I sixt 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 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 fax. The n c I told him that

(57:52):
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 Haxey decided that this was
evidence that the n c I had been compromised by
the vile beasts at the American Medical Association. He later wrote,
I was bitterly disappointed, disillusioned, and shocked. That's uh, that's
my favorite part of anyone full of shit is when

(58:14):
someone like this, here's their pitch out in a in
a nice way, We're like, hell, yeah, what you got?
What you got? Do you 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 like very simple question,

(58:34):
very basic question, very sample questions, and the right and
the other person's like, how dare you When you're okay,
all right, that's what at your move? All right, then
we're done. That's so it's yeah, it's amazing. It rules,
It rules, Billy. Is it pure ego? Is that what
gets you to that room? Doing that? It's like the

(58:56):
like it reminds me of the Casey Anthony thing where
she walks and 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 I think there's ego certainly involved, but I I
feel this is a colder scheme on his partner. I'll
explain why. So he doesn't give up just because the

(59:19):
n c I is like, you're gonna have to provide
us with real evidence. Yeah. Um. He goes to one
of his pet congressmen next, a senator named Elmer Thomas
of Oklahoma. Of course, uh Now, one of Thomas's constituents,
possibly planted by Haxey, had went gone to Elmer and
like raved about the fact that this guy's horse medicine

(59:41):
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 Haxey 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,

(01:00:02):
and Hawsy had no intention of ever submitting to 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 treatments efficacy, and he was able to be like, no,
we went to the n c I, and you know
we've we've submitted data to the n c I. So

(01:00:23):
for the rest of the time you could say like, oh,
we sent them our data. Like we're we're trying to
play a ball here. It's the A M A that
doesn't really want to look into what we're doing. He
was all a scheme. Yeah, smart, always been going on. Yeah. Now.
There were, of course lawsuits against Haxey from patients that

(01:00:45):
his treatments had failed. In the late nineteen forties, he
was sued by a widower who claimed that his wife's
death had been caused by negligent treatment at Hawxy's clinic.
This was probably true, but Haxey's lawyers protected him. He
won two libel suits against Morris Fishbean, The A m
as anti quack attack Dog and the hero of Our
Goatball Doctor episode. Fish Bean was absolutely correct when he

(01:01:06):
called Haxey a cancer charlatan, and 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 cares who died of cancer himself. Haxey sued for
a million dollars and one but was awarded only two dollars,
one for himself and one for his father. And the

(01:01:27):
whole case is really weird. The judge seems to have
believed Haxey's claims about the efficacy of his treatment. So
the judge is like, dumb enough that he felt for
this guy's lies, but he also acknowledged that Haxey was
sort of a grifter, and then all of his marketing
relied on the fact that the medical establishment was trying
to stop him. So he was like, clearly the A
m A didn't damage your business by attacking you. This

(01:01:49):
is how you're selling your treatment. Yes, that is such
a weird train of thought. You're here, what are you
talking about? Yeah, it's very weird. And the judge responsible
for this baffling ruling was a guy named at Well,
and he was on the bench again in nineteen fifty

(01:02:11):
when the FDA went after Haxey with the intentive hitting
him with an injunction to stop him from treating cancer.
Their argument rested on proving that the Haxy treatment did
not work. First, they tracked down all the patients who
talked to Senator Thomas. They eventually selected sixteen cases where
they were able to gather enough information to evaluate, you know, medically,

(01:02:32):
all sixteen of these cases fell into three categories. Either
people who had never had cancer, people who had had
cancer but who had gone to like chemotherapy and actually
had it treated and just also taken Haxey's treatment, or
people who had actually had cancer taken only Haxy's treatment
and died horribly. So yeah, I'm gonna quote again from

(01:02:53):
the medical Messiahs. One of the most poignant cases presented
involved a high school boy of sixteen, 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 Haxey's clinic.
The medical director the father testified had guaranteed a cure.
For some four months, the lad took Haxey's tonics, they

(01:03:14):
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.
But I don't blame the parents either. No, no, no,
I mean fun like, it's it's it's fucked. That's that situation,
and it's it's also as scientists, I'm sure like when

(01:03:35):
they evaluate all this information, they're right, 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 is pretty Yeah, he's bullshit. Yeah. So Haxey
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 testify that Haxey had

(01:03:59):
cured them 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 Haxey's medical director. Dr Derkey,
now the district attorney in this case, pointed out that maybe,
just maybe, doctor der Key wasn't a great guy to

(01:04:20):
take as an expert on anything. He'd graduated from an
osteopathic college in nineteen forty one and only interned for
a single year in an unaccredited hospital in Nebraska Um.
During that unaccredited single year internship, he had seen it

(01:04:41):
most five cancer patients. By the time he joined Haxey's
staff as his medical director in nineteen forty six, he
had seen less than twenty cancer patients in his whole career.
Haxey immediately had him seeing thirty five to fifty patients
per day. Despite his utter lack of experience, Doctor Dirky
claimed he quote did not need a biopsy to make

(01:05:02):
a diagnosis of cancer. You just need a good old
hand dolls one of them cancer all get here, Christ,
it's amazing. On the rare occasions he did submit a
biopsy to a pathological lab, the workers in those labs

(01:05:23):
reported that he did such a piss poor job that
the biopsy could not be used in the same world.
This would have been damning, but Judge Yetwell liked the
cut of Haxey's jib, and he ruled that the FDA
could not claim that Haxey's care was injurious or futile.
His patient survival rate was about as good as a
real doctors. Now. The only reason it was about as

(01:05:43):
good as a real doctors is that real cancer doctors
treated real cancer patients and Hoxy was primarily treating random
people who came in with random problems, who he then
lied and set head cancer. Do you see why his
his his treatment rate was similar to a real cancer doctors.
Half of my patients, who mostly don't have cancer survive,

(01:06:03):
half of your patients who have cancer survived. We're the
same thing. So give me my license back. Let's now. Yeah,
it's great. It rules, Billy, It absolutely rules. It does
it inspires people like Elizabeth Holmes, Yes it did. The

(01:06:26):
FDA appealed and asked a circuit court to grant the
injunction instead, arguing that at Will 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 diagnosed cancer. A
random dude's opinion that something was probably cancer was not

(01:06:47):
a real diagnosis. They chided Judge at Wolf for being
so blind and deaf as to fail to see here
and understand the important effect of such matters on general
public knowledge and acceptance. At Will was required to institute
the injunction, but before it went into effect, Hawksye appealed
to the Supreme Court. They refused to hear the case,
so Hawksy went around them and had does attorney send

(01:07:09):
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 ship right there. Yeah, he's a genius. You're not wrong,

(01:07:35):
but you're wrong. Yeah, this is 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 nineteen fifties. We were just
slightly less stupid about these sorts of things. So after
a bunch more legal slap fighting, the original injunction was

(01:07:57):
finally granted in in nineteen fifty three. It went into
effect in nineteen fifty four after one more last ditch
appeal by Hoxey. 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 nineteen fifty six, his gross annual income was estimated
at one point five million dollars, and he saw more

(01:08:20):
than eight thousand patients that year. Now since, yeah, it's
too many, eight it's so many. That's yeah, it's cool,
it is really, it's it's good. It's good in it rules,
it's God. We're all doomed. We are doomed, Billy, we

(01:08:43):
are doomed. 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

(01:09:04):
needed money, and he got positive quotes from them, which
he also published. Haxey embarked in a nationwide lecture campaign,
applying audiences with lines like this, there's only one way
to'll ever close that Haxey clinic, and that's to put
a militia around it. Yeah, it's amazing, it's amazing. He
was so made for the twenty first century. He would

(01:09:25):
have done incredible on Facebook. Oh my god, he he
would have been fucking Donald Trump's like, um, uh fucking
what do you call the attorney general or not attorney general? Um,
the medical one. Surgeon general's face would be on cigarette.
These are the good cigarettes because I get a cut exactly.

(01:09:49):
They're called half sticks. Yeah. Hoxey also hired a ghostwriter
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 six is when he started claiming that his
grandfather had come up with the herbal mixture at the

(01:10:11):
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
a m A Had written out a fake death certificate
to hide the fact that his dad had really just
died of an infection. Yeah, there layers. The battle he

(01:10:32):
was waging against mainstream real medicine was at the center
of everything Harry Hawksy did. He claimed that his father's
deathbed handover of the recipe for his magical Sath 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.

(01:10:53):
And in Part two we will talk about how Harry
Hawksy was finally driven off the face of the earth,
or at least off the face of the United States.
Because Billy, I'm gonna give you one hint as to
where tomorrow's episodes going. Is it south of the border
down Mexico Way. It's It's it's where it has to end.

(01:11:18):
It's the only place that could go. Once I once
I stow before I even knew where this ended. When
I read fake Cancer here, I said, we're probably gonna
wind up in Rosarto at some point of the town.
I was like, there's a town. There's a couple of them.
You know. The whole Baja Peninsula is a great place
to do that work. It's it is. It's a great

(01:11:42):
I love it. I love it, But it's it is
ironic to me that we have referenced for a show
with the 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

(01:12:05):
fucking Tijuana. Yes, it's so good, but this is the
end of the episode. Billy, you got some plug doubles
to plug? Yes? When is this coming out? God only knows. Okay,
I just go to I'm touring a bunch uh b
w D tour dot com. I'll be in I'm gonna

(01:12:27):
guest start of March probably maybe okay, perfect or maybe
the end of February Tulsa. Uh, I'll be in Wisha, Tulsa,
Oklahoma City, Nashville, Seattle again in April. Um, just go
to be w D tour dot com. Um, go to
be w D tour dot com. Thanks guys, And you

(01:12:50):
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 I right, okay on Twitter.
You can find us at Bastard's Pot on Twitter and Instagram.
We have a tea public store. Robert also co hosts

(01:13:10):
Worst Year Ever with Katie Stole and Cody Johnston and Uh,
if you got your tickets to see Billy and Robert
Dynasty Typewriter on MARCHI yeah, yep, and uh you know, um,
if you want to take to Twitter to give me
ship for making Sophie do all the work at the

(01:13:31):
end of the episode, that's fair. But I'm not going
to change my ways, never