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MEDICAL BLUNDERS
By Robert Youngson and Ian Schott
New York University Press, 400 pages, $18.50 paper
In the 1860s, exposure to blue light was believed to cure every malady from smallpox to gangrene. “Typhoid Mary” once made an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to protest her mandatory confinement after infecting more than 50 New Yorkers. Facts and stories like these fill “Medical Blunders,” a study of historical figures and treatments that, it should be noted, sometimes becomes graphic in its descriptions.