Long before television and radio commercials beckoned to potential buyers, the medicine show provided free entertainment and promised cures for everything from corns to cancer. Combining elements of the circus, theater, vaudeville, and good old-fashioned entrepreneurship, the showmen of the American medicine show sold tonics, ointments, pills, extracts and a host of other "wonder-cures, " guaranteed to "cure what ails you." While the cures were seldom miraculous, the medicine show was an important part of American culture and of performance history. Harry Houdini, Buster Keaton, and P.T. Barnum all took a turn upon the medicine show stage. This study of the medicine show phenomenon surveys nineteenth century popular entertainment and provides insight into the ways in which show business, advertising, and medicine manufacture developed in concert. The colorful world of the medicine show, with its Wild West shows, pie-eating contests, clowns, and menageries, is fully explored. Photographs of performers and of the fascinating handbills and posters used to promote the medicine show are included.

It’s the most unusual medical unit in the galaxy–and it makes house calls. A fully equipped starship lab, Taylor’s Ark is run by Dr. Shona Taylor, a specialist in environmental medicine. She has a menagerie of very special assistants, including an Abyssinian cat, a dog, rabbits, mice, and an alien ottle named Chirwl. Now, this highly trained crew faces the ultimate medical mystery. On Chirwl’s home world, humans and ottles alike are aging at an alarming rate. And if Dr. Taylor doesn’t find a fast cure, the entire colony will die...of old age.

An anthology of eighteen science fiction and fantasy stories collected from the InterGalatic Medicine Show online magazine, plus four new Ender Universe stories. Welcome to the first anthology of stories from Orson Scott Card’s online magazine, InterGalactic Medicine Show. The magazine has been at the forefront of publishing the work of new SF and fantasy talents, as well as many tales of wonder from well-known writers. Additionally, this anthology contains four stories by Orson Scott Card set in the Ender Universe. None of these stories has appeared anywhere except in InterGalactic Medicine Show, and are in print in this volume for the first time. Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show is a true treasure for lovers of science fiction and fantasy, and a must-have for fans of Card’s bestselling novel Ender’s Game. Praise for Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show: An Anthology “Noteworthy SF and fantasy stories from a bumper crop of talented new authors. . . . If the quality of these stories is any indication, IGMS has as much promise as the newcomers it showcases.” —Publishers Weekly

t's the most unusual medical unit in the galaxy - and it makes house calls. A fully equipped starship lab, Taylor's Ark is run by Dr. Shona Taylor, a specialist in environmental medicine. She has a menagerie of very special assistants, including an Abyssinian cat, a dog, rabbits, mice, and an alien ottle named Chirwl. Now, this highly trained crew faces the ultimate medical mystery. On Chirwl's home world, humans and ottles alike are aging at an alarming rate. And if Dr. Taylor doesn't find a fast cure, the entire colony will die ... of old age.

Traces the work of a host of Canadian indigenous theatre artists over the past three decades.

Gary Copeland Lilley's collection, The Bushman's Medicine Show, is a southern gothic testament delivered by an archetypical denizen of the modern south, a sort of Everyman from the Carolina low-country traversing the territories of family, the spirits, society, culture, and identity, while refusing to be eradicated. If there is some type of stigmata, a mark, some identifier of people who have transcended southern stigmas, then the personas, certainly the Bushman, surely wear such a mark. There is the sweltering of American southern heat and humidity in these poems: the dualities within nature and existence, that hard sacred and secular ride that Lilley seems very familiar with. The voice, the music of regional language, the character speech, is an essential element, the proper vehicle that drives these poems down the streets, the dirt roads, and through the piney woods. Riding with Bushman, lean forward in your seat, turn the music on.