162 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



when a patient consults him he terrifies him into believing he has some 

 serious disease which only his medicine can cure. This is a very old 

 form of quackery. Robert Pitt, in a book called " The Crafts and 

 Frauds of Physic exposed," published in London in 1703, says, "A 

 quack is a practitioner who takes no fee in specie, but makes the de- 

 luded patient pay very extravagant fees by the intolerable prices he 

 puts on all cheap medicines, and by passing upon him very many more 

 doses than the disease requires or the constitution can bear." 



That this, the last quarter of our nineteenth century of progress 

 and boasted enlightenment, is as rich in credulity and superstition as 

 any of the preceding ones, is proved by the fact that thousands yearly 

 visit shrines and sacred springs, if Catholics, and attend " faith conven- 

 tions," if Protestants, to be cured of bodily ailments. Not long since 

 one of England's proudest nobles traveled on a pilgrimage to Lourdes 

 in the hopes that Notre Dame de Lourdes would make his only son, 

 who is a deaf-mute, hear and speak. Every day in our own immediate 

 neighborhood, hundreds and thousands of the maimed and the blind 

 make pilgrimages to the sacred spring of Ste. Anne de Beaupre and are 

 miraculously healed have they not a mountain of crutches bearing 

 witness to the fact ? Lately in this city (Montreal), a noted female 

 quack has made the blind to see and the lame to walk at least I 

 have been told so by eye-witnesses and in consequence has attracted 

 crowds of infatuated simpletons, who could not hand in their dollars 

 fast enough to secure a bottle of her wonderful nostrum. The priests 

 of a neighboring city, jealous of poaching on their own grounds, 

 denounced her as a charlatan, and told the afflicted that, instead of 

 being duped by this unholy woman, they should make a pilgrimage to 

 Ste. Anne de Beaupre and be healed ! 



The success of this mode of treatment in hysterical cases is being 

 recognized in France by physicians : they now, when they have an hys- 

 terical patient of a devout frame of mind, on whom they have exer- 

 cised their skill in vain, as a dernier ressort advise that a visit should 

 be made to the shrine of Notre Dame de Lourdes. Thus imagination 

 often works a cure where medicine fails. These cures, as I said above, 

 only take place when the disease is one of the imagination. 



Why is quackery so much more prevalent in medicine than in any 

 other science ? Because the medical quack attributes to himself what 

 is due to Nature. Nature can not build a railway, but she can very 

 often cure disease. A witty Frenchman has said that medicine amuses 

 the patient while Nature cures the disease. 



Is there ever any chance of quackery becoming extinct ? I fear 

 not as long as human nature exists in its present condition. Still, no 

 doubt, there is a probability of the number of believers in quackery 

 being diminished by a greater diffusion of philosophical habits of 

 thought and a more general knowledge of physiology. A writer 

 many years ago, in one of the London medical papers, said : " The final 



