QUACKERY. 447 



QUACKEKY.* 



BY DUDLEY F. SICHER, 



YALE UNIVERSITY. 



WHAT impresses one in reviewing the literature, is the extent 

 and ancient origin of quackery, and the ineffectual fight 

 against it. Eight pages of the 'Index Catalogue of the Library of 

 the Surgeon-General's Office ' are taken up with a bare list of books, 

 pamphlets and addresses, exploiting quackery or aiming at last to deal 

 it the long-evaded death-blow. As early as 1605 we find good Dr. 

 Guybon riding out to the charge with ' Beware of Pickpockets. Or a 

 Caveat to sick folkes to take heede of unlearned phisitions and un- 

 skilf ull chyrurgians ' ; but neither this heavy artillery nor the un- 

 broken fire of subsequent English doctors could daunt the brave hosts 

 of mountebanks who have marched on through the decades, healing 

 the well and making the sick remember their pains. English sover- 

 eigns down through Queen Anne continued to exercise the ' Eoyal 

 Touch'; in 1665 one Valentine Greatrakes successfully laid claim to 

 this same healing power; a certain Dr. John Ward gloriously hum- 

 bugged King George the Second; somewhat later, Elisha Perkins 

 (1741-1799), of Norwich, Conn., son and father of Yale graduates, 

 enthralled two continents — laity and physicians alike — with his Metal- 

 lie Tractors. Then, in the early nineteenth century, floruit (on pick- 

 ings estimated at fifteen thousand pounds per annum) suave John St. 

 John Long, of whom Dr. Francis E. Packard says : ' The list of his 

 patients reads like a directory to the fashionable quarter of London.' 

 These are only a few, the more gigantic, vermin from out the dirty 

 swarm. Everywhere and everywhen we meet with exploiters of secret 

 remedies, unfailing panaceas, advanced treatment {sic), and all other 

 alleged cures which stand as quackery (in the words of Dr. A. T. 

 Schofield) ' when used by unqualified men, or if they are advertised 

 or puffed unprofessionally, or connected with any fraud or wilful ex- 

 aggeration.' But it was left for the modern era to furnish that 

 strangest chapter — of an enormous spread of quacker} r , along with 

 progress in scientific medicine and the growth of education. Berlin, 

 capital city of the world's least hysterical people, reports an increase 

 of 1,600 per cent, in the number of resident quacks since 1874. For 

 England the roll-call is answered by The British Medical Journal 



* Paper read before the Yale Biological Club, March 23, 1905. 



