Quackery

4 Key excerpts on "Quackery"

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  eBook - ePub

  Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800-2000

  • Waltraud Ernst(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  22

  P.S. Brown notes that as nineteenth-century medicine became professionalised, it urgently needed to ‘define its boundaries’.23 Inglis further reminds us that although the term quack was also applied to charlatans who pretended to have knowledge of medicine they did not possess, many nineteenth-century American allopaths, during their struggle for professional dominance, began to use the term quack for ‘all unorthodox practitioners who have not been through a medical school however well qualified and experienced they may be in their techniques’.24 The use of the terms quack and Quackery thus became a convenient way for nineteenth-century allopathic doctors to bolster their image as the only legitimate form of medical praxis.25

  James Harvey Young, in his classic works The Medical Messiahs (1967) and The Toadstool Millionaires (1961), chronicles the rise of Quackery and patent medicines (and devices) and the way American legal authorities have sought to suppress unorthodox medicines and therapeutic practices from the nineteenth to the middle part of the twentieth century.26 Young’s The Medical Messiahs is especially detailed in its telling of the role the American Medical Association (AMA) and local and national legislation have played in limiting medical diversity.27 As Young points out, the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century medical ‘quack-busters’ used the yardstick of science to expose medical Quackery to great effect.28 They also helped to enact a number of federal laws aimed at restricting and limiting the types of ‘patent’ medicines that could be made and promoted. Previously, American food and drug laws were primarily ‘Jacksonian’ or libertarian in spirit. However, during the ‘Progressive Era’ (c.1900–17) the social climate began to change as various groups sought to implement governmental and legal control over a number of cultural practices.29

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  Physicians, Plagues and Progress

  The History of Western medicine from Antiquity to Antibiotics

  • Allan Chapman(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Lion Books

    (Publisher)

  HAPTER 19

  Charismatics, Quacks, and Folk Healers into the Early Industrial Age

  Defining a “quack” before the mid nineteenth century was often as much about legal definitions and language as it was about therapeutic capacity. After 1518 anyone found practising medicine in London who held no qualification from the new Royal College of Physicians was technically a charlatan, or an illicit practitioner, and open to prosecution. As physicians of the “Fellowship” were so small in number, and too expensive to be of service to the vast majority of Londoners, sheer necessity meant that a medley of trained surgeons, apothecaries, and even grocers (who often imported opiates and other “groceries” from the Levant) were involved in healing. Unless they called themselves “doctor” or “physician”, they were often left in peace to “physick” ordinary folk, while the gentlemen of the Fellowship concentrated on sick courtiers and rich aldermen.

  A proper charlatan, rather, was usually seen as an uneducated, untrained, self-advertised, loud wonder-worker, with the gift of the gab, and good at separating people from their hard-earned pennies. Quack is thought to derive from “Quicksilver”, or “Quack-salver”: a practitioner who promised secret cures, often for the embarrassing new disease of syphilis, using mercury. Much of the opprobrium associated with “quacks” derived, therefore, from their boasted cures for sexual diseases. They were also known as “Pox-doctors”, not from treating smallpox or chickenpox, but from the sexually transmitted “Great Pox” chancres of syphilis.

  As we shall see in this chapter, “quacks” and “charlatans” were a very vigorous and long-lasting breed, ranging from the occupants of Tudor fairground booths to Victorian purveyors of “secret” patent medicines obtained by post, to a diverse medley of “alternative healers” in our own day and age. But what about faith healers?

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  Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture

  • Louise Penner, Tabitha Sparks, Louise Penner, Tabitha Sparks(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pittsburgh Press

    (Publisher)

  38 Advertising in itself was dangerous, and support by religious officials repugnant, Wakley believed, but the real source of society’s investment in such remedies was the prevailing belief in the tacit or explicit support given to them by medical professionals.

  If, as Wakley surmised, ‘Quackery is of itself weak, [and] … could not exist in its present rampant state if all the overt and covert assistance it obtains from medical men and medical names were entirely withdrawn’, then the disavowal of the trade by doctors would do much to diminish its prominence.39 But one obstacle, seemingly insurmountable, would still remain: forgery. Two kinds of forgery were preventing the medical profession from achieving the kind of legitimacy Wakley imagined for it. The first involved the fraudulent use of a doctor’s name in patent applications and tax payments; purveyors ‘applied for the protection of government patents to preserve their trade secrets’ and, once patented, they were subject to taxation of twelve percent of the retail price under the many post-American Revolution stamp acts.40 At the time that proprietors filed for a patent and paid the required duty, they received an official stamp that the government required to be embossed on the products themselves.41 While the government simply collected payments and did not evaluate the merits of the products themselves or seek to determine whether the names that appeared, either on the packaging or on the submitted taxation documents, were appropriated or forged, for most consumers the stamp served to guarantee the product’s authenticity and legitimacy. One correspondent to The Lancet complained, ‘Is it not monstrous that a government stamp should be attached to the quackish poisons of the present day?’42

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  New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies

  • Stephanie M. Hilger(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  A boastful pretender to arts which he does not understand. 2. A vain boastful pretender to physick; one who proclaims his own medi- cal abilities in publick places. 3. An artful tricking practitioner in physick (1614). Johnson’s definition did not specify mountebanks or empirics; by invoking the intention and behavior of deception, he thereby expanded the category of quack doctors considerably. The Royal College of Physicians had stopped its vigilant policing of unlicensed practices since Charles II; as a result, the number and type of medical operators increased significantly in the eight- eenth-century medical milieu, where government regulation was limited and the rules of the market dictated. 18 The medical marketplace changed dramati- cally as the eighteenth century progressed due to its thriving market econ- omy, growth in the print industry, and increased publicity and advertising. Although medicines and medical training did not improve in the century, 19 the commerce of medicines did. The focus was on selling and market- ing medicines, not on medical services. Regular medical practitioners— apothecaries, surgeons, and physicians—increased significantly in number, but they were still exceeded by irregular practitioners. In the competitive medi- cal trade, all sorts of medicines and treatments, traditional and unorthodox, THE CHANGING FACE OF QUACK DOCTORS … 345 were sold and advertised extensively in newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and broadsides (Cody 105–6; Porter, Disease 42). Already in the seventeenth century, the distinctions between quacks and College doctors were not always clear in terms of their diagnosis, medicines, and services. The blurred bound- ary between regular and irregular practitioners was made more obvious with increased communication and advertising in eighteenth-century print culture. Both advertised and competed for customers, and the increased communica- tion channels meant more publicity and commentary about their activities.

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