Most readers won’t be familiar with Clark Stanley. And yet, to those who lived in the Old West, he was a household name. In the aging half of the nineteenth century, Stanley’s theater company was one of several that toured rural towns selling magical health elixirs. For the townsfolk, seeing a Clark Stanley convoy kicking up dust on the horizon would have been an exhilarating sight. After unloading their carts and setting up their makeshift stage, Stanley and his crew treated the crowd to a thrilling show. Acrobats flipped, magicians tricked, and mustachioed musclemen bent bars and rods. Their only job was to whip the audience into a frenzy for the main event: the medicine man. And Clark Stanley was the most famous and revered of them all.

The Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science BOOK: https://www.nbtiller.com

Skeptical Inquirer magazine: https://www.skepticalinquirer.org

Original article & references: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/telling-true-stories-what-can-the-anti-science-community-teach-us-about-sci-comm/

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