Relax-A-Cizor Instruction Booklet - Quack Medical Device 1951 – B/W Photos – Some Graphic & Risqué

Item Details

California, William J. Browner, 1951, instructions Paper

Acceptable

Offered is an illustrated instruction booklet for the Relax- A Cizor. Relax-A-Cizor was one of the first-ever fitness wearables. It was so dangerous it was banned by the US government for causing miscarriages and hernias. The line between “convenient exercise device” and “ornate torture tool” was thinner back in the 1950s. Before it was outed as medically horrifying, the Relax-A-Cizor was marketed as an easy way to get thin in your sleep, a glamorous “reduction” contraption endorsed by Doris Day. Invented by an engineer named William J. Browner, who hand-built and sold prototypes around Hollywood after World War II, the Relax-A-Cizor was a hit throughout the 1950s and 1960s, selling over 400,000 devices at $100 to $400 a pop before people figured out it was a claptrap paralysis-causing hazard. These instructions are on stiff paper and folded. 6 ¾” x 11 ¼” and six pages. Illustrated with b/w drawings and photographs. Some of the photographs are quite revealing for instructions. Now this is rough. It is complete, but creased and wrinkled as well as beginning to split along the first fold. Also some discoloration along the split. Unusual and interesting. See scans.  **** This devise was just featured on Season 2 Episode 12 of History Channel’s Hazardous History.