"Quackery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... recognize both soul and body in dealing with the organism. Medicine is a Religion, a Faith, a great Solution. It ought to be supported by the state, free to all.... The old medicine is either machine work or quackery, like the blood-letting of ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... have liked one himself, but had no money, and was further restrained by a sense of conviction that his father would say it was all nonsense and quackery. ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... preliminary impediments, and frightful medusa-heads of quackery, which deter many generous souls from entering, is of the half-articulate professions, and does not much invite the ardent kinds of ambition. The intellect required for medicine might be wholly human, and indeed should by all rules be,—the profession of the ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... talking of preventing the spread of the cancer, but leaving it just where it is. They admit that, constitutionally, it has now a right to ravage two-thirds of the body politic—but they protest against its extension. This in moral quackery. Even some, whose zeal in the Anti-Slavery cause is fervent, are so infatuated as to propose no other remedy for Slavery but its non-extension. Give it no more room, they say, and it may be safely left to its fate. Yes, but who shall ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... of breeding, but also interesting on the ground of her complaint, which puzzled the doctors, and seemed clearly a case wherein the fulness of professional knowledge might need the supplement of quackery. Lady Chettam, who attributed her own remarkable health to home-made bitters united with constant medical attendance, entered with much exercise of the imagination into Mrs. Renfrew's account of symptoms, and into the amazing futility in her case of ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Medicine and Quackery, and were received with loud laughter: they danced a minuet, to which Death clinked the music with a purse ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... remembered John Wesley's "sulphur and supplication," and so many other cases where ministers had meddled with medicine,—sometimes well and sometimes ill, but, as a general rule, with a tremendous lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose way of admitting evidence,—that I could not help ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... riders." But the confidence with which they propose their theories is less surprising than the facility with which their propositions have been entertained, and their extravagant pretensions admitted. We need not marvel at the success of quackery in medicine and theology, when we look at the career of the St. John Longs in political life. From the time in which the bullion question came out of Pandora's Scotch mull, parliament has been wearied with the interminable discussions which they ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... leaving obscurity more obscure than before. As for us, who hunger after lucidity, let us relinquish abstruse theories to whoever delights in them and confine our ambition to observable facts, without pretending to explain the quackery of the plasma. Our method certainly will not reveal to us the origin of instinct; but it will at least show us where it would be waste of ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... never take account of any ulterior effects which may be apprehended from the remedy itself. It generally troubles them not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature. Against all such social quackery the obvious injunction to the quacks is, to mind their ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... be more true, than the proposition ludicrously illustrated in this passage, that real science is in most instances of slow growth, and that the discoveries which are brought to perfection at once, are greatly exposed to the suspicion of quackery. Like the ephemeron fly, they are born suddenly, and may be ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... still worse, of an ecclesiastical advocate. If they had given the matter proper consideration, they would have given me leave to follow my own inclinations, and I would have been a physician—a profession in which quackery is of still greater avail than in the legal business. I never became either a physician or an advocate, and I never would apply to a lawyer, when I had any legal business, nor call in a physician when I happened to be ill. Lawsuits and pettifoggery ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... it may seem akin to quackery to recommend a uniform depth and distance, without reference to the character of the land to be drained; and it is unquestionably true that an exact adaptation of the work to the varying requirements of different soils would ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... perhaps through a motive of delicacy that he persisted in making a needless mystery of his suspicions. In any case he was evidently a man who despised all quackery from the bottom of his heart. The old doctor looked at him with a frown of disapproval, as if his frank confession had violated the ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... quack, Sir John Hill, who, with his insolent attacks upon the Royal Society, pretentious botanical and medical compilations, plays, novels, and magazine articles, has long sunk into utter oblivion. It is said of him that he pursued every branch of literary quackery with greater contempt of character than any man of his time, and that he made as much as L1500 in a year;—three times as much, it is added, as any one writer ever made in ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... Kremlin." His anxiety to show the French that, even during his hottest campaigns, his mind continued to be occupied with them and their domestic administration has already been alluded to. There was audacious quackery in a stage rescript ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... course, appears to me true and relevant; but I cannot help feeling that it is, after all, but a poor piece of quackery to comment on a multitude of phenomena without adverting to the principle which lies at the root, and gives the true meaning to them all. Now this principle I seem to myself to find in the state of mind which is attributed to Teufelsdrockh; in his state of mind, I say, not in his opinions, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... scurrilously take upon himself to judge his judges, what sport, what ridicule will he excite! There was found a Luther to say that he preferred to Councils the opinions of two godly and learned men (say his own and Philip Melanchthon's) when they agreed in the name of Christ. Oh what quackery! There was found a Kemnitz to try the Council of Trent by the standard of his own rude and giddy humour. What gained he thereby? Infamy. While he, unless he takes care, shall be buried with Arius, the Synod of Trent, the older it grows, shall flourish the more, day ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... infallible Church, however tyrannical but the idea once admitted that there may be many churches; that what is called the State can be separated from what is called the Church; the plea of infallibility and of authority soon becomes ridiculous—a mere fiction of political or fashionable quackery to impose upon the uneducated ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... down in all the restless agony of body that arises from an overstrained mind. But soon Miss Monro reappeared, bringing with her a dose of soothing medicine of her own concocting, for she was great in domestic quackery. What the medicine was Ellinor did not care to know; she drank it without any sign of her usual merry resistance to physic of Miss Monro's ordering; and as the latter took up a book, and showed a set purpose of remaining with her patient, Ellinor was compelled to lie still, and presently ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... abroad as loved at home, how ample, The tribute to that modest spirit paid! To pushing quackery a high example, A ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... unshaken. He had all the roues of Paris running to him, and consequent charges of quackery and charlatanism. How much of these unsavory epithets really applied to him will not be determined until we have a better acquaintance with his more intimate life. A biography and collection of his letters is needed. But it is certain that the general principles he arrived ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... chiefly known to the world as a trance lecturer under what claimed to be spirit influence. Although speaking in the interest of a faith generally unpopular, and involved in no slight degree in crudities, extravagance, and quackery, she was herself neither fool nor fanatic. She was a true child of nature, direct and simple in her manners, and impatient of the artificiality and formal etiquette of fashionable society.' These poems ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... put in practice the very theories which now seem to us absurd and impossible? Many of the evils of society have been measurably removed or ameliorated; yet now, as in the days of the Apostle, "the creation groaneth and travaileth in pain;" and although quackery and empiricism abound, is it not possible that a proper application of some of the remedies proposed might ameliorate the general suffering? Rejecting, as we must, whatever is inconsistent with or hostile to the doctrines of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... EURIPIDES. 'Twas pure quackery; in this way the spectator would sit motionless, waiting, waiting for Niob to say something, and the piece would ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... shows what improvement has taken place in the Surrey region. If at first he indulged in rant, he has now subsided into an even vein; he puts things plumply, and tells his feelings gravely, and makes his points without quackery. So it is plain that when he gives notice of a contribution for his college, in which young men are trained for the ministry, and states simply, in justification, that one hundred and fifty have already left it, and are now engaged in preaching the dissenting word, he is to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... against vice is of so general a kind as to remind us more of some of the old philosophers than of the Roman satirists. At the same time he says he has only spoken against impostors, and is only the enemy of false pretence, quackery, lies, and puffing. But we may suppose that he would not be sparing of his lash in any direction, for in the "Resuscitated Philosophers," he observes, "Philosophy says that ridicule can never make ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... advice; no reasoning, no entreaty, has availed to induce her to see a physician. After reading your letter she said, "Mr. Williams's intention was kind and good, but he was under a delusion: Homoeopathy was only another form of quackery." Yet she may reconsider this opinion and come to a different conclusion; her second thoughts are often ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... excipted, was profissional Midicine from Hippocrates to Sampsin. Antiphlogistic is but a modern name for an ass-ass-inating rouutine which has niver varied a hair since scholastic midicine, the silliest and didliest of all the hundred forms of Quackery, first rose—unlike Seeince, Art, Religion, and all true Suns—in the West; to wound the sick; to weaken the weak; and mutilate ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... alum down street, do what I tell you with it, and cure yourself.' It's robbery, sir, I say, all these out-of-the-way cheap dodges, which arn't in the pharmacopoeia, half of them; it's unprofessional, sir—quackery." ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... pretensions ... exquisitely bad taste and extremely vulgar modes of thinking." His "Rimini" "is so wretchedly written that one feels disgust at its pretense, affectation and gaudiness, ignorance, vulgarity, irreverence, quackery, glittering ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... anasbleki. Quack cxarlatano. Quackery cxarlatanismo. Quadrangle kvarangulajxo. Quadrant kvadranto. Quadrate kvadrato. Quadrate kvadrata. Quadratic kvadrata. Quadrature kvadrato. Quadrille kvadrilo. Quadruped kvarpieda. Quadruple kvarobla. Quaff ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... indeed bears me witness, that from the time I quitted Cambridge no human being was more indifferent to the pleasures of the table than myself, or less needed any stimulation to my spirits; and that, by a most unhappy quackery, after having been almost bedrid for near six months with swollen knees, and other distressing symptoms of disordered digestive functions, and through that most pernicious form of ignorance, medical ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... to unseat kings, whose dogma of "Divine-right" had by the French Revolution been shown to be only insidious political quackery, in the past sustained largely by the sword. The common people were wrestling to grasp this monarchic sword away, and here and there had already seized the hilt or the blade—it mattered not which!—and the dynasties of Hohenzollern, Hapsburg, Wittelsbach, ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... almost entirely independent of ecclesiastical influence, and was besides largely responsible for this decree. It was felt that something had to be done to stop the evil that had arisen and the charlatanry and quackery which was being practised. This was, however, rather an attempt to regulate the practice of medicine and keep it in the hands of medical school graduates than an example of intolerance towards the Jews. Practically no Jews had graduated at ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... rarely heard of. Curious is it to find that some of the diseases which in the olden time swept off myriads on myriads in every country, now cause fewer deaths than some diseases thought of little account, and for the cure of which people therefore rely, to their cost, on quackery instead ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... words which, with his own singular felicity of speech, he addressed two years ago to the Indian Civil Service:—"We have a clouded moment before us now. We shall get through it—but only with self-command and without any quackery or cant, whether it be the quackery of blind violence disguised as love of order, or the cant of unsound and misapplied sentiment, divorced from knowledge and untouched by any cool consideration ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... was extensively accused of quackery, and on one occasion when the Herald touched on the same subject, it brought him to our office and he exhibited diplomas, certificates and ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... cover a meditated betrayal. He said that he had always looked a little askance on my researches, and particularly upon my demonstrations; that they were doubtless astonishing, but had lain, to his taste, a little too near the border-line of quackery,—Yes, Roddy, he said the word, and it did not choke him. On the whole and speaking as a friend (yes, he used that word, too), he must express a hope that I would not press to renew my connection with the Silversmiths' College. It would pain him inexpressibly, remembering ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... men, having from one to three years' training, including over one hundred physicians with full medical training plus a course in osteopathy. There were means of learning fifteen years ago what was truth and what was quackery about the practice of osteopathy. By refusing to look for its truth and by concentrating attention upon its quackery the medical profession has lost fifteen years. Whereas the truth of osteopathy should have been adopted by the medical colleges and a knowledge ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... content to refer our readers to the passage (vol. ii. p. 96) as an illustration of his skill in this interesting branch of farm-surgery. He is really an amiable sheep-operator, our author—what placid benevolence and hatred of quackery appear in his instructions— "Learn to slaughter gently, dress the carcass neatly and cleanly, in as plain a manner as possible, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... Secret-Book of Queen Elizabeth, in manuscript, written, for aught I know, by her own hand. On examination, however, it proved to contain, not secrets of state, but recipes for dishes, drinks, medicines, washes, and all such matters of housewifery, the toilet, and domestic quackery, among which we were horrified by the title of one of the nostrums, "How to kill a Fellow quickly"! We never doubted that bloody Queen Bess might often have had occasion for such a recipe, but wondered at her frankness, and at her attending to these ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... As for quackery and mountebanks, of which the town was so full, I listened to none of them, and have observed often since, with some wonder, that for two years after the plague I scarcely saw or heard of one of them about town. ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... that Mr. Smith's uncle is a large proprietor in the puffing newspaper; and that he wrote the articles in question in a much warmer strain than that in which they appeared, the editor having sadly curtailed and toned them down. In the long run, all this quackery does no good. And indeed long accounts in provincial journals of family matters, weddings and the like, serve only to make the family in question laughed at. Still, they do harm to nobody. They are very innocent. They please ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... and follies committed by the Legislature to the lasting injury of the State, he is entitled to no praise or blame beyond the rest. He shared in that sanguine epidemic of financial and industrial quackery which devastated the entire community, and voted with the best men of the country in favor of schemes which appeared then like a promise of an immediate millennium, and seem ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... population of negro slaves, or to make them more efficient and valuable, docile and manageable; comfortable, happy and contented by still further improving their condition, which can only be done by studying their nature, and not by the North and South bandying epithets—not by the quackery which prescribes the same remedy, the liberty elixir, for all constitutions. The two races, the Anglo-Saxon and the negro, have antipodal constitutions. The former abounds with red blood, even penetrating the capillaries and the veins, flushing the face and illuminating the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... subject upon which even ingenious men are often singularly negligent. There is, perhaps, no trade or profession existing in which there is so much quackery, so much ignorance of the scientific principles, and of the history of their own art, with respect to its resources and extent, as are to be met with amongst mechanical projectors. The self-constituted ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... with wife, children, and all our servants. We have taken a house for two months, and have been here a fortnight. I am already a little stronger...Dr. Gully feels pretty sure he can do me good, which most certainly the regular doctors could not...I feel certain that the water-cure is no quackery. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... quackery very early, and administered solution for the eye in various parts of the streets pro bono publico. The Rais sent for me likewise, and I poured a few drops of caustic into his eyes. In fact, I was full of business, although but a few hours in the town, and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... of a Dotheboys (and girls) hall, a Squeeritic graft to relieve simple Baptist folk of their hard-earned boodle by beludaling the brains of their bairns with mis-called education. Unfortunately there is more brazen quackery in our sectarian colleges than was every dreamed of by Cagliostro. The faculty of such institutions is usually composed of superficially educated people who know even less than is contained in the text-books. As a rule they are employed because ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the perfection of penal legislation at which, after many royal commissions, and much parliamentary eloquence, we have arrived! One would have imagined that a gigantic quackery and multitudes of quack doctors could have been procured and set in motion with less trouble and at less expense! Only on one point there is universal agreement, let the machine be working either in the right ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... the gout, and a "Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease" (1708?-9). His notoriety brought on him the ire of a "licens'd practitioner in physick and surgery," one J. Spinke, who, in a pamphlet entitled "Quackery Unmask'd" (1709), dealt Marten some most uncourteous blows. From the pamphlet, it is difficult to judge whether Spinke or Marten were the greater quack; we should judge the former. Certainly Marten deserves our sympathy, if ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... curing the most vicious horse. But still in difficult and exceptional cases it cannot be too often repeated that a MAN is required, as well as a method. Without nerve nothing can be attempted; without patience and perseverance mere nerve will be of little use; all the quackery and nonsense that has been talked and written under the inspiration of the Barnum who has had an interest in the success of the silent, reserved, practical Rarey, must be dismissed. Horse-training is not a conjuror's trick. The principles ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... case, say, of the race for wealth, we may safely make an analogous remark. If a man's aim in becoming rich is of the vulgar kind; if he wishes to make an ostentatious display of wealth, and to spend his money upon demoralising amusement; or if, again, he tries to succeed by quackery instead of by the production of honest work, he is, of course, so far mischievous and immoral. But a man whose aims are public-spirited, nay, even if they be such as simply tend to improve the general ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... can do more execution by being converged upon him. Had he appeared as an intelligent, knowing, and efficient controversialist on the side of the traditions of his profession, his wholesale denunciation of quackery, vulgar or genteel, might be referred to conceit; had he turned state's evidence against the accredited deceptions of his own profession, and gone over entirely to the enthusiasts who think that medicine is not an experimental ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... little foreseeing that it made a hotbed for the airing of discontents, and for the parading of ideals which alone could blot out those discontents. All took to it like ducks to the village pond. There was much quackery; some honest noise. ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... doctor knows. But Dr. Floddin has an honest face, and keeps a little drug store on State street below Eighteenth. He usually charges fifty cents a visit, which is all he believes his services to be worth. This piece of quackery would ruin his name with Lockwin, were it known to him, or had Dr. ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... form. They are an expedient, in his opinion, only suited to a state of transition, and even that nowhere but in England. The attempt to naturalize them in France, or any Continental nation, he regards as mischievous quackery. Louis Napoleon's usurpation is absolved, is made laudable to him, because it overthrew a representative government. Election of superiors by inferiors, except as a revolutionary expedient, is an abomination in his sight. Public functionaries ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... Simoninnism was followed by a respectable body of admirers; Robespierrism has a select party of friends. If, in a country where so many quacks have had their day, Prince Louis Napoleon thought he might renew the imperial quackery, why should he not? It has recollections with it that must always be dear to a gallant nation; it has certain claptraps in its vocabulary that can never fail to inflame a ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray |
