If Satan has ever succeeded in compressing a greater amount of concentrated mendacity into one set of human bodies, above every other description, it is in the advertising quacks.
Pacific Medical and Surgical Journal.
The bold and unblushing assertion of the empiric, of a never-failing remedy, constantly reiterated, inspires confidence in the invalid, and not unfrequently tends by its operation on the mind, to assist in the eradication of disorder.
Thos. J. Pettigrew, F.R.S.
The word quack, meaning a charlatan, is an abbreviation of quack-salver. To quack is to utter a harsh, croaking sound, like a duck; and hence secondarily, to talk noisily and to make vain and loud pretensions.[202:1] And a salver is one who undertakes to perform cures by the application of ointments or cerates. Hence the term quack-salver was commonly used in the seventeenth century, signifying an ignorant person, who was wont to extol the curative virtues of his salves. Now we see, said Francis Bacon, in "The Advancement of Learning,"[202:2] the weakness and credulity of men. For they will often prefer a mountebank or witch before a learned physician. And therefore the poets were clear-sighted in discerning this extreme folly, when they made Esculapius and Circe brother and sister. For in all times, in the opinion of the multitude, witches, old women and impostors have had a competition with physicians.
According to one authority, the term quack is derived from an ancient Saxon word, signifying small, slender and trifling, and hence was applied to shallow and frivolous itinerant peddlers, who foisted upon a credulous community such wares as penny-plasters, balsam of liquorice for coughs, snuffs for headaches, and infallible eye-lotions.[203:1]
It has also been maintained that quack is a corruption of quake, and that quack-doctors were so called because, in marshy districts, patients affected with intermittent fever, sometimes vulgarly known as the quakes, were wont to be treated by ignorant persons, who professed to charm away the disease, and hence were styled quake-doctors.
In William Harrison's "Description of the Island of Britain," occurs the following curious passage: "Now we have many chimneys, and yet our tenderlings complain of reumes, catarres and poses; then had we none but reredores, and our heads did never ake. For, as the smoke in those days was supposed to be a sufficient hardening for the timber of the house, so it was reputed a far better medicine to keep the good man and his family from the quacke or pose, wherewith as then very few were acquainted." A writer in "Notes and Queries,"[203:2] remarked that the word quacke, in the foregoing extract, probably signified a disease rather than a charlatan, and possibly the mysterious affection known as "the poofs," from which good Queen Bess suffered one cold winter. This quacke appears to have been a novelty and therefore fashionable, affected by the tenderlings of that era, "as the proper thing to have." The quack-doctor, continues the writer above mentioned, must have been a fashionable style of man, not meddling much with the poor, and familiar with boudoirs, curing the new disease with new and wondrous remedies.
May not the word quacke, asks Stylites, another enquirer, as above used, mean quake or ague? For an ague-doctor must have had much employment, and if successful, great renown, in those days of fens, marshes and undrained ground.