Violet McNeal ran away from her family’s rural Minnesota farm in the late 1880s and fell under the spell of conman and patent medicine “doctor” Will Archi

In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Luthe

Here is the fascinating though ofttimes shady history of the medicine show, an American show-business institution that dispensed hoopla and nostrums to a credul