Quacks

And then there were the quacks, the people whose treatments or concoctions were out and out fraudulent. We’re already acquainted with Dr. John Case.  This is his advertisement:

 

Hogarth (below) shows what he thinks of quack doctors in his moral painting of the viscount Squanderfield holding a small pill box, which probably contains mercury pills or venereal disease “cures.” The young woman is a prostitute, dabbing her mouth where an early syphilis sore is located. The office is filled with the accoutrements of a medical practice – skull on desk, skeleton in closet (!) next to a life size anatomical figure, and an apothecary’s showcase to the left holding earthenware. (Wellcome Library, accessed 11 September 2012.)

The worst were the mountebanks, who travelled around selling their supplies from a portable stage in the street. Ned Ward reported that he observed a couple of women fighting with a rowdy crowd around them, when suddenly:

“Just as the squabble was ended and before the rabble was dispersed, who should be stumbling along upon his hidebound prancer [horse], but a horse-mountebank, who seeing so rare an opportunity to hold forth to a congregation already assembled, spurred up his foundered Pegasus [a mythological horse with wings], and halting in the middle of the crowd, plucked out a packet of universal hodge-podge, and thus began his oration to the listening herd.”
The quack was advertising a packet for six pennies with a combination of:
 A pill that gave one twenty stools to take away twenty distempers
 A plaster that was good for all wounds, pains and aches, broken bones, “or any hurt whatsoever”
 A powder to fortify the stomach, by protecting it from infections, recovery when one had overeaten, and getting rid of worms
 An antidote to other medical treatments, such as mercury, arsenic, and opium. This one also cleaned and refastened one’s teeth.
Ward recounts: “This impudence so tickled the ears of the brainless multitude that they began with as much eagerness to untie their purses, and the corners of their handkerchiefs [where they had tied their coinage], and to be free of their pence, as they usually are to buy apples by the pound, or to purchase the sight of a puppet show, that it was as much as ever the doctor could do to hand out his physic fast enough. Thus they continued flinging away their money, showing there were fools of all ages, from sixty to sixteen, many of them looking as if they could scarce command as much more till next Saturday night when they received their wages; till at last, either the doctor broke the crowd of their money, or the crowd the doctor of his physic. Then away he trotted on horseback with their pence, and left his patients to trudge away on foot with his packets.” Ward thought it appalling that these quacks would plan as a “business to cheat the common people not only out of their money, but often out of their health, which is far more valuable.” (Waller, 90-93.)

(All pictures from Wellcome Library, London.)

This picture identifies John and Charles Wesley preaching in the background! Even around the message of God, the mountebanks took advantage. Wonder if any of them were converted?

Next time, we'll go back to talking about why people were so willing to try any kind of cure, even if it seems ridiculous to us.  Now aren't you grateful for physicians and pharmacists and the FDA and physical therapists and nurses and all of the other medical people you can trust?