822 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



quarters of the world. We can find examples of them as far back 

 in the world's history as we have a mind to go ; but the typical 

 quacks date from the end of the sixteenth century. Beginning 

 with this period, reputations have been established the remem- 

 brance of which has been sent down to us. Charlatans have also 

 had their times of trouble, but the species has been preserved and 

 perpetuated from generation to generation, from century to cen- 

 tury, and still nourishes. Quacks still invest themselves with 

 embroidered cloaks, wigs, and indescribable hats, or something 

 like them, and with the help of the most astonishing blandness 

 sell their wares, which are warranted to cure all diseases. It is 

 not easy to learn to gain the ear of the throng, but some persons 

 are marvelously skillful at it. Some quacks engage exclusively in 

 special lines of practice, while others will offer a balm sovereign 

 against all diseases. I recollect that when I was a child one Zozo 

 passed regularly from one village to another at the time of the 

 rural festivals, selling a vermifuge, the praises of which he 

 sounded in a speech whose eloquent persuasiveness I have never 

 heard excelled. The tradition is preserved also in Paris of Dr. 

 Napolitano, who used to make his perorations in 1815, dressed in 

 a magnificent scarlet cloak trimmed with gimp arid gilt; of Du- 

 chesne, who inclosed himself in a sack and pulled a tooth with 

 one hand and fired a pistol with the other ; of Lartaud, chiropo- 

 dist to the Emperor of Morocco, etc. 



The type of the plumed charlatan, such as is represented in 

 Gerard Dow's picture in the Munich Museum and Du Jardin's in 

 the Louvre, is declining, and is now met less frequently in the 

 large cities. It is giving place to another type, more modest in 

 its bearing, and less noisy the empiric, or quack doctor. He, too, 

 lived in the former centuries, as is shown in an eighteenth-century 

 picture of a wandering surgeon torturing a poor fellow for some 

 trouble in his shoulder (Fig. 1). Another picture (Fig. 2) repre- 

 sents Michel Schuppach, known as the mountain doctor, giving a 

 consultation in his rustic apothecary shop to a lady of the court 

 who has two lords attending her. The corpulent old fellow is 

 calmly looking at the flask containing the potion he is preparing, 

 while a servant is waiting to give him the flasks he will require 

 for completing the mysterious remedy. 



Stories of these empirics of the seventeenth and eighteenth 

 centuries might be cited by hundreds. The memoirs of the time 

 are full of recitals of their prowess, and sometimes of their fail- 

 ures. Ducerf had an oil of guaiacum which, whether taken inter- 

 nally or rubbed on, would cause the disappearance of any disease ; 

 Caretto, an Italian who pretended to be a marquis, sold a wonder- 

 ful remedy for two louis d'or per drop. A doctor of Chaudrais, 

 near Mantes, a peasant of much good sense, who sold simples and 



