"Quackery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 may certainly be learned ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... 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
... did the poor Hedgehog oppose them. With all the pertinacity of ignorance, they maintained their certainty of his abnormal condition; and with all the officiousness of quackery, they insisted upon immediate amputation. Aided by two volunteer assistants, the self-made surgeons cut off limb after limb before their reckless butchery could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... has been developed in the question: Can disease be healed through mental treatment? If so, under what conditions and subject to what limitations? Has mental healing a philosophical and scientific basis, or is it variously composed of quackery, superstition, and assumption? In the simplest terms, how much truth does it contain? Any candid inquirer will admit that even if a minimum of its claims can be established, the world needs it. If it can be of service in ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... "Cush quackery go, But, besides you must know, I'd heard of a profiting Prophet below; Big botherum blether, Who pretended to gather The tricks that the Moon meant ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... contemptible kind of cheating is quackery.—The quack is liar, thief, and murderer all in one. For in undertaking to do things for which he has no adequate training and skill, he pretends to be what he is not. He takes money for which he is unable to render a ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... some cases made, the extreme boldness of some foreign adventurers, the jealousy of the army, and strong national prejudices, all contributed to confound disinterested zeal with private ambition, and talents with quackery. Supported by the promises which had been given by Mr. Deane, a numerous band of foreigners besieged the congress; their chief was a clever but very imprudent man, and although a good officer, his excessive vanity amounted almost to madness. With M. de Lafayette, Mr. Deane had sent out a fresh ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... universal depression and want of confidence, all trade had well-nigh stopped, and political quackery, with its cheap and dirty remedies, had full control of the field. In the very face of miseries so plainly traceable to the deadly paper currency, it may seem strange that people should now have begun to clamour for a renewal of the experiment which had worked so much evil. Yet ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... sympathised in by the latter;—such appeals being always met by him with those sallies of ridicule, which he found the best-humoured vent for his impatience under argument, and to which, notwithstanding the venerable name and services of Mr. Bentham himself, the quackery of much that is promulgated by his followers presented, it must be owned, ample scope. Romantic, indeed, as was Lord Byron's sacrifice of himself to the cause of Greece, there was in the views he took of the means of serving her not a tinge of the unsubstantial ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... 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
... left the room, and walking up and 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 ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the fear of the sick on false grounds, encouraging them in the belief of error until they hold stronger than before the belief that they are first made sick by matter, and then restored through its agency. This fosters infidelity, and is mental quackery, that denies the Principle of Mind-healing. If the sick are aided in this mistaken fashion, their ailments will return, and be more stubborn because the relief is unchristian ...
— Rudimental Divine Science • Mary Baker Eddy
... any other than the somewhat unworthy ground of the curious ugliness of his face and figure. It is most unlikely that his success as a practitioner in a branch of the medical art in which imposture is the most easily detected, could have been earned by mere quackery; and he seems, moreover, to have been a man of learning in more kinds than one. The probability is that the worst that could be alleged against him was a tendency to scientific pedantry in his published writings, which was pretty sure to tickle the fancy ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... "cockney equestrians are the most fearless of all 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 have raised ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... 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
... answer of medical quackery when challenged on incontrovertible facts. "Why, my friend," he said with elaborate carelessness, "if I tried to deny everything that irresponsible parties say about me, I wouldn't have any time left for business. Well, well; ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... there to pay for the one insertion?" "Oh, nothing," I replied, "as the editorial probably did you more injury than the advertisement did you good." On leaving, with prophetic vision, he said, "I prophesy a short life for this paper; the business world is based on quackery, and you cannot live without it." With melancholy certainty, I replied, "I fear ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the 19th century apprenticeship afforded the only means of acquiring a knowledge of dentistry. The profits derived from the apprenticeship system fostered secrecy and quackery among many of the early practitioners; but the more liberal minded and better educated of the craft developed an increasing opposition to these narrow methods. In 1837 a local association of dentists was formed in New York, and in 1840 a national association, The American Society of Dental ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... Lucian on the philosophic quackery of his day (about 120 A.D.), "The Sale of the Philosophers," we have a most interesting account of the system ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear
... 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 needed was a twice-told tale to his white ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... be expelled and evil spirits of every kind rebuked—these, like the holy water, the robes of the priest, and the sign of the cross, the Calvinists considered either with scorn and contempt as the tools of deliberate quackery and imposture, or with horror and loathing, as the fit emblems and instruments of ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... together, of all ages and both sexes, in one little hut, sleep on one mat, and eat from one dish. From irregularity of habits and frequent exposure, they are often sick; and with the aid of a superstitious quackery, sink rapidly and in ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... rode triumphant, bediademed, becoronetted, bemitred; or the still fataller species of Secret-Scoundrels, in their fair-sounding formulas, speciosities, respectabilities, hollow within: the race of Quacks was grown many as the sands of the sea. Till at length such a sum of Quackery had accumulated itself as, in brief, the Earth and the Heavens were weary of. Slow seemed the Day of Settlement: coming on, all imperceptible, across the bluster and fanfaronade of Courtierisms, Conquering-Heroisms, Most-Christian Grand Monarque-isms. Well-beloved Pompadourisms: ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... if we adopt the convenient Melanesian word lately brought into use. Whatever percentage of psychological truth may lie at the root of such performances, it is obvious that they must in the main be wholly inadequate, and must constantly tend to pass into mere quackery and become discredited; and it was the special function of the religious organisation of early society to eliminate and ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... fasting; and, by George, sir, I wouldn't swap my modest victory for the vogue of the biggest boomster in England! [Boisterously.] Ha, ha, ha! Whoop! [Seizing ROOPE and shaking him.] Dare to preach your gospel to me now, you arch-apostle of quackery and self-advertisement! ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... 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)
... is highly recommended, and if the wishes are not gratified by the attainment of the desired object, the consoling reflection will recur, that—"there are not quite two blanks to a prize"—which is more than can be said of quackery in general. Tickets and Quarters ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 1: Curiosities of the Old Lottery • Henry M. Brooks
... the socialist purpose well. To the workingmen it has brought home the importance of capturing the control of industry. Economic determinism has been an antidote to mere preaching of goodness, to hero-worship and political quackery. Socialism to succeed had to concentrate attention on the ownership of capital: whenever any other interest like religion or patriotism threatened to diffuse that attention, socialist leaders have always been ready to show that the ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... quackery should be vigorously fought by laymen as well as physicians. Quacks live by lying and misleading advertisements. Every one should cooperate to encourage the movement by which newspapers and magazines are giving ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... hand. The nation was divided into three classes; the possidenti, the dotti, and the commerrianti. The landholders, to be taxed; the literary men, to be silenced; and the merchants, to have all the ports shut against them. These sounding words in Italian are even better adapted to the purposes of quackery than ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... Medicine and Quackery, and were received with loud laughter: they danced a minuet, to which Death clinked the music with ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... capacity, we hope we are strangers to all the world; have feud or favour with no one,—save indeed the Devil, with whom, as with the Prince of Lies and Darkness, we do at all times wage internecine war. This assurance, at an epoch when puffery and quackery have reached a height unexampled in the annals of mankind, and even English Editors, like Chinese Shopkeepers, must write on their door-lintels No cheating here,—we thought it ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... at heart a knave, I fancy, among whose dupes is himself. Did you not see our quack friend apply to himself his own quackery? A fanatic quack; essentially a fool, though ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... practise my 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 ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... 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 are characterized by great case of style, flowing rhythm, earnestness in the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... disasters of Napoleon, and their fatal consequences, the exposition of the state of the kingdom in 1814 was undignified, and appeared to be unjust. The points in which it reflected honour on the authority from whence it emanated, were the moral tone, the liberal spirit, and the absence of all quackery, which were its leading features. These recommendations had their weight with right-minded, sensible people; but they passed for little with a public accustomed to the dazzling noise and bustle of the power which had ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... 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
... aims, we consider the 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
... birth than many very honest people suspect; nay, more than, were the register of its nativity laid before their eyes, they would be willing to admit. We have no space for its voluminous history; but it is our belief, since quackery first plied its profitable trade with human incredulity, it never perpetrated so successful a trick as that exhibited by Sir ROBERT PEEL in his motion of want of confidence. The first scene of the farce ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... while one hand is employed in shaking yours, he is disembarrassing you of the contents of your pocket with the other. Underline is a gentleman of some literary attainments, though not entirely divested of quackery; he is particularly noted for the emphasis he gives to certain points in his discourse, and though in some cases, perhaps, he is a little too prodigal of this kind of effect, yet we could not well do without him. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... the ordinary laws of human reasoning in many others. But the rather liberal rules of interpretation, which it is now the fashion to apply to the first chapter of Genesis, will relieve the reader from any scruples on the former account; and as to the latter, in these days of scientific quackery, it would be quite too harsh to make any great complaint about such peccadilloes. The writer has taken up almost every questionable fact and startling hypothesis, that have been promulgated by proficients or pretenders in science during the present century, except animal magnetism; and for ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... submit to any guide who boldly asserts his claim to superior discernment. It is more difficult to ascertain and establish the merits of a poem than the powers of a machine or the benefits of a new remedy. Hence it is in literature, that quackery is most easily puffed, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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
... upon my head, and bury me beneath its ruins. This day decides not only your fate, poor child, but mine. To-day must Mesmer prove to the world that the animal magnetism, which physicians deride as a quackery, savans deny as impracticable, and the people ignorantly worship as sorcery, is a golden link which binds humanity to heaven. To-day you shall be healed by the magnetic power which binds you to me, and links us both ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... advice on the subject, dose themselves with ginger-tea, strong infusion of hyson, or any other powerful green tea, pepper, and whiskey, with many other remedies that have the sanction of custom or quackery. ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... signal to withdraw from action with his sightless eye, which could not see it. A fear of disregarding ethics lost to Grouchy the chance of assisting Napoleon at Waterloo. In our strife against ignorance and quackery the profession should follow the general plan of action usually adopted by Lord Nelson—lie alongside of whom you can and sink or capture your enemy; let each man do his duty; never mind any general plan. A reverse to this mode of fighting ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... more dangerous than a mass of discontent which does not know what remedy is to be sought. All sorts of cures will be tried, many of them mere quackery, and their failure will make ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... heart of the nation. England had never succumbed, but an indefatigable faction had played every art of quackery to set her faculties asleep, with the appearance of having her eyes more open than ever. Whiggism, by its tricks, was mesmerising the common sense of the country. From this adventitious torpor Burke recalled her to her natural temperament, restored sight to her eyes, taught her to resume the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... came into possession of The Glen Tower, Morgan discovered that he had saved as much money for his old age as a sensible man could want; that he was tired of the active pursuit—or, as he termed it, of the dignified quackery of his profession; and that it was only common charity to give his invalid brother a companion who could physic him for nothing, and so prevent him from getting rid of his money in the worst of all possible ways, by wasting it on doctors' bills. In a week after ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... 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, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... mothers persist in exposing the largest possible amount of surface of their children to the cold, by the absurd style of dress they adopt, and then marvel at the peculiar dispensation of Providence, which removes their infants by bronchitis and gastric fever? Why is it that quackery rides rampant over the land; and that not long ago, one of the largest public rooms in this great city could be filled by an audience gravely listening to the reverend expositor of the doctrine—that the simple physiological phenomena known as spirit-rapping, table-turning, ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Kirkham's new system of "English Grammar in familiar Lectures," I am satisfied that the pre-eminent advantages it possesses over our common systems, will soon convince the public, that it is not one of those feeble efforts of quackery which have so often obtruded upon our notice. Its decided superiority over all other systems, consists in adapting the subject-matter to the capacity of the young learner, and the happy mode adopted of communicating it to his mind in a manner so clear and simple, ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... superficial quackery, and that isn't all. This fetid naturalism eulogizes the atrocities of modern life and flatters our positively American ways. It ecstasizes over brute force and apotheosizes the cash register. ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... increasing confidence in the future if we keep steadily before us the wise 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
... quack—who doles out the bread pills of injustice, and the strychnine stimulants of injustice and the deadening laudanum of injustice, and falls back on the body of the decisions to uphold him in his quackery. Justice demands that he take that fake corporation, made solely to evade the law, and shake its guts out and tell the men who put up this job, that he'll put them all in jail for contempt of court if they try any such shenanigan in his jurisdiction again. ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... matters. They gave no weight to research, and thought, about religious facts; and dreamed that each one among themselves gained a kind of spiritual knowledge by inspiration. It was a time of conceits and quackery; but there was a better spirit abroad, of which this good man Host was the representative. He began in the pestilence, and went to all houses indifferently, whether they were princes or peasants; and there was a common-sense in what he did and said, a universal character ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... Prophetic Faculty: War and Peace Clearing away the Fog The Danger of living among Christians: A Question of peace or war Legislative Quackery, Ignorance, and Blindness to the Future Evils that need Attention What is Intellectual Greatness Spiritual Wonders—Slater's Tests; Spirit Pictures; Telegraphy; Music; Slate Writing; Fire Test MISCELLANEOUS INTELLIGENCE—Erratum; Co-operation; Emancipation; Inventors; Important Discovery; ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... say?" he repeated wonderingly. "But of course you know! Imagine the horror of it—a health-food for the mind! Huge sums of money rolling in from the pockets of credulous people, money stinking with the curse of vulgarity and quackery! It is almost like a false note, dear, to speak of it out here, but I must tell you because they are angry with me. I am afraid that your father will send me away, and I am afraid that our little dream is over and that I ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... notice the above disorder arises out of the well-known fact, that there is no complaint of childhood more frequently subjected to quackery and mismanagement than is this. Indeed, there are few maladies against which a greater array and variety of means have been ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... Intellectual non-combatant It is so hard to prove a negative Let him be patient with an opinion he does not accept Life becomes to them as death and death as life List of things that everybody says and nobody thinks List of things that everybody thinks and nobobody says Lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose way of evidence Meddling with things that can take care of themselves Most persons have died before they expire No company of craftsmen that did not need sharp looking after Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things Not love in word, neither in tongue, ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger
... recollecting that the word is used to express two classes of thoughts very different, and separated by civilization, though confounded by the savage, it will not surprise one to find that the medicine-men are conjurers as well as doctors, and that their conjurations partake as much of medical quackery as does their medical practice of affected incantation. As physicians, the medicine-men are below contempt, and, but for the savage cruelty of their ignorance, undeserving of notice. The writer has known a man to have his uvula and palate torn out by a medicine-man. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... artists' life there. The observations are throughout racily humorous, and those who have within a few years visited 'the Cradle of Art' cannot fail to recognize, as hit off with no sparing hand, more than one American notoriety. Art quackery as it exists, is well shown up in 'Americans in Rome;' the author having little in common with those amiable romancers who glorify every illiterate picture-maker, though he never fails to do justice to true genius. We believe, in short, that these sketches form a very peculiar, piquant, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... "is a man of extravagant 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 and ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... bassoon, of every unwieldy and unmanageable instrument in fact, are particularly abundant; and perhaps the most popular of all are the particularly clever gentlemen who, by dint of a dozen years' or so unremitting practice, have succeeded in making one instrument sound like another. Quackery as this is, it is enormously run after by no small proportion of the public. Not that they do not appreciate the art of the device at its proper level, but that the trick is curious and novel; and most people, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... office which leads us to exaggerate the merits of the occupant, and to suppose that he must be wiser than common men. He, however, who gains access to cabinets, soon finds out by what foolishness the world is governed. He finds that there is quackery in legislation as in everything else; that rulers have their whims and errors as well as other men, and are not so wonderfully superior as he had imagined, since even he may occasionally confute them in argument. Thus awe subsides into confidence, confidence ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... Bobadil, in the same comedy, perhaps Jonson's masterpiece in the way of comic caricature. Cynthia's Revels was a satire on the courtiers and the Poetaster on Jonson's literary enemies. The Alchemist was an exposure of quackery, and is one of his best comedies, but somewhat overweighted with learning. Volpone is the most powerful of all his dramas, but is a harsh and disagreeable piece; and the state of society which it depicts is too revolting for comedy. The ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... other regular 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 ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... 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
... bibliopolic Accounts, my Friend! we will trust them, with a faith known only in the purer ages of Roman Catholicism,— when Papacy had indeed become a Dubiety, but was not yet a Quackery and Falsehood, was a thing as true as it could manage to be! That really may be the fact of this too. In any case what signifies it much? Money were still useful; but it is not now so indispensable. Booksellers by their knavery ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Antiquary of the scene which he had witnessed between Dousterswivel and his patron in the ruins of St. Ruth, and frankly confessing that he could not resist the opportunity of decoying the adept once more to visit the tomb of Misticot, with the purpose of taking a comic revenge upon him for his quackery. He had easily persuaded Steenie, who was a bold thoughtless young fellow, to engage in the frolic along with him, and the jest had been inadvertently carried a great deal farther than was designed. Concerning the pocket-book, he explained that he ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... my fortune in any profession but that of an advocate, and, what is 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 ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... open to every ignorant and stupid practitioner on the credulity of the public. Why cannot we get a law regulating the profession which is of most vital interest to all of us, excluding ignorance and quackery? Because the majority of our legislature, representing, I suppose, the majority of the public, believe in the "natural bone-setter," the herb doctor, the root doctor, the old woman who brews a decoction of swamp medicine, the "natural gift" of some dabbler in diseases, the magnetic ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... what should be humaner literature, and look at the self-constituted censors of whatever has passed the press, there also we shall find that they who are the most incompetent assume the most authority, and that the public favour such pretensions; for in quackery of every kind, whether medical, political, critical, or hypocritical, quo quis impudentior ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... wrong from want of knowledge, in which case it is clear that he wants the highest intuitions of genius; or he sins against knowledge, in which case he must have been misled by the false promptings of a morbid vanity, eager for that applause of fools which always waits on quackery, and which is never refused to extravagance when tricked out in the guise of originality. It is difficult, from the internal evidence supplied by his works, to know which of these two theories to ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... disgraceful reproach to the profession of medicine; it is quackery, horrid unwaranted murderous quackery.... But I will ask another question, who is it that can stop the career of mercury at will, after it has taken the reins into its own destructive and ungovernable hands? He, who for an ordinary cause resigns the fate ...
— Allopathy and Homoeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense! • Frederick Hiller
... as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn—they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account. Much quackery teems, of course, even on democracy's side, yet does not really affect the orbic quality of the matter. To work in, if we may so term it, and justify God, his divine aggregate, the People, (or, the veritable horn'd ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... nevertheless, is a 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 engineer, dazzled with the ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... kept my promise, and am thoroughly satisfied. Phrenology deserves to be called a science, and one of the greatest and best of sciences, notwithstanding all the quackery and self-delusion that I find among the professors. I have now studied it and experimented upon it for more than thirty years, and have no longer any misgivings upon the subject, so far as the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... such as "Tetradymus, Hodegus, Clidopharus;" "Adeisidaemon, or the Unsuperstitious." He pretends these affected titles indicated their several subjects; but the genius of Toland could descend to literary quackery. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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. Some fancied they were all swept away in the infection ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... enough—comfortable things—some of them a little queer—one or two that folks have a prejudice against—and then there is that one thing that I don't know. It is foolish in me to be dallying with such a mess, which I thought was a piece of quackery, while that strange visitor bade me do it,—and yet, what a strength has come from it! He said it was a rare cordial, and, methinks, it has brightened up my weary life all day, so that Pansie has found me the fitter playmate. ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... account of errors 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 ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... appear to claim him. He has no mother, Mrs Root, without you will be to him as one; and I conjure you, sir, to let the fatherless find in the preceptor, a father. Let him only meet for a year or two with kindness, and I will cheerfully trust to Providence for the rest. Though I detest the quackery of getting up a scene, I wish to be as impressive as I can, as I am sorry to say, more than a year will unavoidably pass before I can see this poor youth again. Let me, at that time, I conjure you, see him in health and cheerfulness. Will you permit me now ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... and monks, who "waxen out of number," meet with small mercy from their fellow-monk. Falsehood and fraud are described as dwelling ever with them. Their unholy life and unseemly quarrels are held up for reprobation. Nor do the nuns escape the imputation of unchastity. The quackery of pardoners, with their pardons and indulgences from pope and bishop, is treated with contempt and scorn. Bishops are criticised for their undivided attention to worldly matters; and even the Pope himself does not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... they come from Maine or California, they all succumb to the same allurements. The test here is the manner in which people use the wealth they have acquired. "Almost any man may quarry marble or stone," but how few can build a Rheims or "create an Apollo." When one thinks of the gambling, quackery, and other vocations far less respectable upon which vast fortunes are spent he thinks how dreadful the results of all of this spending. "What if all this wealth that is spent foolishly were used to advance the common interests of mankind? What if ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... appointed to confer it: one young clergyman at Weimar shot himself on this account; heresy, and jarring, and unprofitable logic, were universal. Hence Herder's vehement attacks on this 'pernicious quackery;' this delusive and destructive 'system of words.'[26] Wieland strove against it for another reason. He had, all his life, been labouring to give currency among his countrymen to a species of diluted epicurism; to erect a certain smooth, and elegant, and very slender scheme of taste ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... magnetism, always, in fact, men were occupied more or less with this vital principle,—principle of flux and influx,—dynamic of our mental mechanics,—human phase of electricity. Poetic observation was pure, there was no quackery in its free course, as there is so often in this wilful tampering with the hidden springs of life, for it is tampering unless done in a patient spirit and with severe truth; yet it may be, by the rude or greedy miners, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... 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 anything worse than it is in itself, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... eight thousand 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 of its possibilities and limitations ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... the progress of the charlatan, through the records of ancient history; for the sake of brevity, a retrospective glance must not be directed beyond the fifteenth century, when the arch priest of "modern quackery" made his appearance upon the medical stage. In the year 1493, Phillippus Aureolus Theophrastus Paracelsus Bombastus de Hohenheim, was ushered into existence, and at a very early age announced his discovery, that the recognised principles of medical science were erroneous, and that in him ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... against the quackery of Paracelsus, by Leonard Doldius, a Nurnberg physician, and translated into Latin and augmented, by Andreas Libavius, doctor and physician of Rotenburg, alludes to the same story, and gives the Jew a new name nowhere else met with. After having ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... him. He found his patient cured by the draught! It was contrary to all rule and precedent; it savored of quackery—the red lavender had no business to do what the red lavender had done—but there she was, nevertheless, up and dressed, and contemplating a journey to London on the next day but one. "An act of duty, doctor, is involved in this—whatever the ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... boast of a millionaire pill-maker like the late Professor Holloway, we have not often been without a local well-to-do "quack." A medical man, named Richard Aston, about 1815-25, was universally called so, and if the making of money is proof of quackery, he deserved the title, as he left a fortune of L60,000. He also left an only daughter, but she and her husband were left to die in the Workhouse, as the quack did not approve ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... Some men are still 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 ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... girl and a fine fortune into the bargain." I must not forget our friend the consulting surgeon H***ks, or omit to notice that in Bath the faculty are all distinguished by some peculiar title of this sort, as, the digestive Physician, the practical Apothecary, and the operative Chemist; a piece of quackery not very creditable to their acknowledged skill and general respectability. At dinner we were again joined by our facetious 331friend Blackstrap, who, to use his own phraseology, having made "a good morning's work of it," hoped he might be permitted to make one among us, a request with ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... herb that grows at every cottage door. People will not have that, but if you bring them some medicine from far away, very rare and costly, and suggest to them some course out of the beaten rut of ordinary, honest living, they will jump at that. Quackery always deals in mysteries and rare things. The great physician cures diseases with simples that grow everywhere. A pennyworth of some familiar root will cure an illness that nothing else will touch. It is a homely virtue, but if in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Practitioners hitherto have been the only students; and so, as in medicine, before the rise of Physiology and Natural History, experimenta fructifera, and not lucifera, have been sought. The scheme of such a science has even been thought quackery, through the vain attempts of some theorists to frame universal precepts, as though their failure (arising from the variety of human circumstances) proved that the phenomena do not conform to universal laws. Social phenomena, however, ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... hysterical subjectivism which destroys sound judgment, and dissolves the sense of reality which it has taken modern science many generations to build up. Science has all along had to combat such wresting of its more obscure and unexplained facts into alliance with the ends of practical quackery, fraud, and superstition; and psychologists need just now to be especially alive to their duty of combating the forms of this alliance which arise when the newer results of psychology are so used, whether it be to supplement ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... 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 expected to ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... 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 Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... works, on the whole, are his four great satirical comedies. 'Volpone, or the Fox,' assails gross vice; 'Epicoene, the Silent Woman,' ridicules various sorts of absurd persons; 'The Alchemist' castigates quackery and its foolish encouragers; and 'Bartholomew Fair' is a coarse but overwhelming broadside at Puritan hypocrisy. Strange as it seems in the author of these masterpieces of frank realism, Jonson at the same time was showing himself the most gifted writer ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... for quackery, my dear Miss Olive!" This broke from Basil's lips in spite of a vow he had just taken not to say anything that should "aggravate" his hostess, who was in a state of tension it was not difficult to detect. But he had lowered his tone to friendly pleading, and the offensive ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... pulsations, fears, self-doubts, hates, goodness, devotedness, and noble world-love; this is not done under pretty flowers of metaphor in the lispings of a pet parson, or in the strong but uncertain fashion of the American school; still less in the dry operose quackery of professed doctors of psychology, mere chaff not studied from nature, and therefore worthless, never felt, and therefore useless; but with the firm knowing hand of the anatomist, demonstrating and making clear to others, that the knowledge may ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... 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 ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... unattained desire, an inexpressible belief. Norden said to her, the only way is "to 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 ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... women to dosing and drugging. "Nervousness." Qualms of the stomach. Eating between our meals—its mischiefs. Evils of more direct dosing. What organs are injured. Confectionery. The danger from quacks and quackery. ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... people; I only say that their temptations are as great, and that an honest man—a man perfectly honest every how and every where—is a wonder. Whatever an honest man does is a benefit to all the rest of us. If he become a lawyer, justice is more secure; if a doctor, quackery is in danger; if a clergyman, the devil trembles; if a shoemaker, we don't wear rotten leather; if a merchant, we get thirty-six inches to the yard. I have been long in business. I have met many honest ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... of quackery and delusion the report of the Committee on Currency and Foreign Exchanges breathes a refreshing blast of sound common sense. Everybody ought to read it. It costs but twopence; it is only a dozen pages long, and it is described (if you want to order it) as Cd. 9182. ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... William Euen, A short expose on quackery ... or, introduction of his son to physicians and country ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... it grew pretty extensive, partly because it was understood to be a matter of favor and difficulty, dependent on a capricious will, to obtain his services at all. There was unquestionably an odor of quackery about him; but by no means of an ordinary kind. A sort of mystery—yet which, perhaps, need not have been a mystery, had any one thought it worth while to make systematic inquiry in reference to his previous life, his education, ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... knew and used herbs with something of the practical wisdom which she applied to her cooking. In every community there was likely to be one woman or more to whom the rest turned in emergencies, and a rude practice was kept up which cannot be called quackery, for it was entirely unpretentious. Something also was due to the knowledge derived from the Indians, whose closeness to nature was supposed to give them excellent opportunities for wresting secrets from ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... himself!) were, whether they wished it or not, thaumaturgi. If we set out with the principle that every historical personage to whom acts have been attributed, which we in the nineteenth century hold to be irrational or savoring of quackery, was either a madman or a charlatan, all criticism is nullified. The school of Alexandria was a noble school, but, nevertheless, it gave itself up to the practices of an extravagant theurgy. Socrates and Pascal were not exempt from ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... blague[obs3]. sham; pretense, pretending, malingering. lip homage, lip service; mouth honor; hollowness; mere show, mere outside; duplicity, double dealing, insincerity, hypocrisy, cant, humbug; jesuitism, jesuitry; pharisaism; Machiavelism, "organized hypocrisy"; crocodile tears, mealy-mouthedness[obs3], quackery; charlatanism[obs3], charlatanry; gammon; bun-kum[obs3], bumcombe, flam; bam*[obs3], flimflam, cajolery, flattery; Judas kiss; perfidy &c (bad faith) 940; il volto sciolto i pensieri stretti[It]. unfairness &c (dishonesty) 940; artfulness &c (cunning) 702; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 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 ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... all its forms had inspired Average Jones with a profound contempt and dislike for the cruelest of all forms of swindling medical quackery. And this swollen, smug-faced intruder looked a particularly offensive specimen of his kind. Therefore ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... common manuals of school logic should not have secured Baxter from the repeated blunder of 'Cum hoc, ergo, propter hoc'; but still more strange that his piety should not have revolted against degrading prayer into medical quackery. ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... thought that it was not very practicable in any event for the public to obtain a satisfactory test of medical efficiency, that it was certainly not practicable if the competition by the private teachers were suppressed, that otherwise the medical examination might become as great a quackery as the medical degree, and that the whole question was a mere squabble between the big quack and the little one. He unfolds his views in ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... a German physician, born near Constance; bred for the Church, but took to medicine; was the founder of animal magnetism, called mesmerism after him, his experiments in connection with which created a great sensation, particularly in Paris, until the quackery of it was discovered by scientific investigation, upon which he retired into obscurity, "to walk silent on the shore of the Bodensee, meditating ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... estrangements, having your girl go back on you,—they don't signify very long if a man has sound health and a full purse. The ministers and novel writers and fellows that preach the sentimental view of life don't believe it themselves. It's a kind of professional or literary quackery with them. Just let them feel the pinch of poverty, and then offer them a higher salary or a chance to make a little 'sordid gain' in some way, and see how quick they'll accept the call to 'a higher sphere of usefulness.' Berk, hand over a match, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... as know 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 family whose ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... 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 ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... this man had acquired reputation for ability was this,—he never pretended to any branch of knowledge of which he was ignorant, any more than to any virtue in which he was deficient. Honesty itself was never more free from quackery or deception than was this embodied and walking Vice. If the world chose to esteem him, he did not buy its opinion by imposture. No man ever saw Lord Lilburne's name in a public subscription, whether for a new church, or a Bible Society, or ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 unwritten ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... flew as a bird flew, that is to say by their own inherent strength, and without the aid of gas-bags or buoyancy chambers, which he, like all the disciples of Nadar, Jules Verne, Maxim and Langley, had looked upon as mere devices of quackery, or at the best, playthings of rich people, who usually paid for their ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... eye, but an inspection of the pamphlet will convince almost any thinking person of the truth of my suggestion. The fact is, Sir Humphrey Davy was about the last man in the world to commit himself on scientific topics. Not only had he a more than ordinary dislike to quackery, but he was morbidly afraid of appearing empirical; so that, however fully he might have been convinced that he was on the right track in the matter now in question, he would never have spoken out, until he had every thing ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... made to the Queen of a drawing made by her, and presented by the Empress to M. Gerard, chief clerk of Foreign Affairs, on the occasion of his going to Vienna to draw up the articles for her marriage-contract. "I should blush," said she, "if that proof of the quackery of my education were shown to me. I do not believe that I ever put a pencil to that drawing." However, what had been taught her she knew perfectly well. Her facility of learning was inconceivable, and if all her teachers had been ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... grammatical authorship has sunk so low, that no man who is capable of perceiving its multitudinous errors, dares now stoop to notice the most flagrant of its abuses, or the most successful of its abuses? And, of the quackery which is now so prevalent, what can be a more natural effect, than a very general contempt for the study of grammar? My apology to the reader therefore is, that, as the honour of our language demands correctness in all the manuals prepared for schools, a just exposition of any that are lacking ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... protection of her husband was removed by the hand of a medical prodigy who advertised himself as the discoverer of a new and infallible cure for cancer, and whom Mrs. Marrineal, with an instinctive leaning toward quackery, had forced upon her spouse. Appraising his prospective widow with an accurate eye, the dying man left a testament bestowing the bulk of his fortune upon his son, with a few heavy income-producing properties for Mrs. Marrineal. Tertius Marrineal was devoted to his ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... cxarlatano. Quackery cxarlatanismo. Quadrangle kvarangulajxo. Quadrant kvadranto. Quadrate kvadrato. Quadrate kvadrata. Quadratic kvadrata. Quadrature kvadrato. Quadrille kvadrilo. Quadruped kvarpieda. Quadruple kvarobla. Quaff glutegi. Quaggy marcxa. Quagmire marcxejo. Quail (bird) koturno. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... things. Hence a severe taste was cultivated, which excluded vulgarity and grossness in the intercourse of life. It was the rule to be courteous, affable, gentlemanly, for all this was in harmony with the severity of art. The comic poets ridiculed pretension, arrogance, quackery, and lies. Patriotism, which was learned from the dangers of the State, amid warlike and unscrupulous neighbors, called out many manly virtues, like courage, fortitude, heroism, and self-sacrifice. A hard and rocky soil necessitated industry, thrift, and severe punishment ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... Marten, the author of two treatises on 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
... 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
... Cures for incurable diseases are promised, and guaranteed. Every scheme that human and devilish ingenuity can devise to wring money from its victim is resorted to, which can be employed without actually bringing the advertisers into court. All this wicked quackery parades under the guise of 'patent' medicines, and asks the protection of our courts. It is time for the medical and pharmaceutic professions to unite, and unmask this monster, and show the public its true nature. And this can be accomplished in no better way than ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen |
