"Quack" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... temerities and imaginative eccentricities. Still, my young friend certainly went beyond all bounds. Master Ambroise Pare, who was the first to attempt the ligature of arteries, and who, having commenced his profession at a time when surgery was only performed by quack barbers, nevertheless succeeded in lifting the science to the high place it now occupies, was assailed in his old age by all the young sawbones' apprentices. Being grossly abused during a discussion by some young addlehead who might have been the best son ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... and pallid. Not many ruddy complexions. Why all these sharp-faced, lantern-jawed, lean, sallow, hard-handed people? Why this depression of spirits? Perhaps they really get a thrill out of religion after all. Why all these advertisements of quack remedies, why all this calling on God? This is a place of bright sunshine and exhilarating air. After all, I do ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... be a little difficult to trace: for the scores are older than we ourselves, and there has never yet been a settling-day since things were. You get entertainment pretty much in proportion as you give. As long as we were a sort of odd wanderers, to be stared at and followed like a quack doctor or a caravan, we had no want of amusement in return; but as soon as we sank into commonplace ourselves, all whom we met were similarly disenchanted. And here is one reason of a dozen, why the world is dull to ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who fawned on the great, flattered the wealthy, and despoiled the poor. Another class traversed the country, selling pardons "come from Rome all hot," and extolling the virtues of their relics and the power of their indulgences with the eloquence of a quack vending his nostrums. Bishops held civil offices under the king, and priests acted as stewards in great men's houses. Simony possessed the Church, and the ministers of religion again sold their Master ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... and all that is good into its fatal, deadly quagmire.' To the assertion that our valued contemporary is 'the possessor of one of the brightest intellects of the present century' (as he so modestly informs us) we do not cavil at for one moment. But even the patients under the Jordan (American quack) system may have relapses; and, when the Planters' Friend can calmly publish two columns of leaded matter insinuating that a mud bank on the shores of Cleveland Bay is to become the leading port of North Queensland, we can but regretfully infer that the ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... the voice of a duck. You do not speak with the quack of which they are so proud. And then, if you are truly a duck, why are you ...
— Children's Classics In Dramatic Form • Augusta Stevenson
... the true virtuoso spirit. For the most part their enthusiasm is adopted to suit the time and opportunity— to practise imposture upon the British and Austrian millionaires. In painting and gemmary, Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack— but in the matter of old wines he was sincere. In this respect I did not differ from him materially: I was skillful in the Italian vintages myself, and bought largely ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... the wheel-hoe is much too clumsy an affair to allow of the pursuit of an individual weed. While the operator is busy adjusting his machine and manipulating it about the corners of the garden, the quack-grass has escaped over the fence or has gone to seed at the other end of the plantation. He devised an expeditious tool for each little work to be performed on the garden,—for hard ground and soft, for old weeds and young (one of his implements ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... miles without stopping, and finished by pitching me off his back upon the ground, in leaping a fence. This fall produced some disease of the spine, which clung to me till I was twelve years old, when it was almost miraculously cured by an itinerant Arab physician. He was generally pronounced to be a quack, but he certainly effected many wonderful cures, mine ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... been found and engaged, the next procedure was to appoint the assessor judges, of whom the consular instructions insisted on there being four. This weighty matter seemed to require the cooperation of the vice consul, Mr. Beaver, a highly respected quack doctor, whose principal nostrum was faith cure plus hot water. After arguing away your existence, which he always could do with extraordinary fluency, he would plunge you into a boiling bath till your imaginary ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... Anukul was resting after a long and weary day in court. His wife was buying, at an exorbitant price, a herb from a mendicant quack, which was said to ensure the birth of a child. A voice of greeting was heard in the courtyard. Anukul went out to see who was there. It was Raicharan. Anukul's heart was softened when he saw his old servant. He asked him many questions, and offered ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... blotted out as spurious,—which indeed they are. Hapless ages: wherein, if ever in any, it is an unhappiness to be born. To be born, and to learn only, by every tradition and example, that God's Universe is Belial's and a Lie; and 'the Supreme Quack' the hierarch of men! In which mournfulest faith, nevertheless, do we not see whole generations (two, and sometimes even three successively) live, what they call living; and vanish,—without chance ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... than from all the men he ever conversed with. He is a most amiable, sincere, modest man in a room, this Boanerges in the temple. Mrs. Montague told him the dedication would do him no good. "That shall be a reason for doing it," was his answer. Judge, now, whether this man be a quack. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... if a sudden frost had nipped all my thoughts, I grew suddenly conscious that the first ceremony I assisted at with Aniela was a funeral. As a person in long sickness, having lost faith in medicine, turns to quack doctors and wise women, so the sick soul, doubting everything, still clings ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... authorities of Catholic and Protestant lands, the anatomists and physiologists had at last obtained permission to dissect bodies and to substitute a positive knowledge of our organs and their habits for the guesswork of the mediaeval quack. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... the Italian quack of whom I bought the drug you gave to the count, and which put an end to his days—he wanted more money. Well, as I had no more to spare, I could spare no more to him, and he turned vicious, and threatened. I threatened, too, ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... in the country! And I love for to live on the farm! I love for to wander in the grass-green fields— Oh, a country life has the charm! I love for to wander in the garden— Down by the old haystack; Where the pretty little chickens go 'Kick-Kack-Kackle!' And the little docks go 'Quack! Quack!'" ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... one of the sandwiches, was to transfer, if possible, the headache to the stomach, on the principle that the quack doctor cured a patient of paralysis by throwing him into fits, claiming that he was not much on paralysis, but he was hell on fits. The entrance of the piece of sandwich into the stomach—that is, the small pieces that we were able to blast off ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... ake.[83] For as the smoke in those daies was supposed to be a sufficient hardning for the timber of the house; so it was reputed a far better medicine to keepe the goodman and his familie from the quack or pose, wherewith as then verie few were oft acquainted." Harrison, i. 212, ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... running before the wind and soon were near enough to get a good view. It was a bird of some kind. We were in no doubt about the kind when it raised itself upon the water, flapped its wings and uttered a loud "Quack! qu-a-a-a-ck!" ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... position for a sensible man like John Bull to be placed in by a blethering idiot, who can argue with equal volubility on either side, but with more conviction when in the wrong. Bull must have been drunk, and drunk on stupid beer, when he placed his heart strings between the finger and thumb of a quack like that, who, whatever the result, whether we get Home Rule or not, has ruined the country for ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... to die; that all true men continued true to this hour,—Odin himself true, and the Grand Lama of Thibet himself not wholly a lie. The Lecture on Mahomet ("the Hero as Prophet") astonished my worthy friends beyond measure. It seems then this Mahomet was not a quack? Not a bit of him! That he is a better Christian, with his "bastard Christianity," than the most of us shovel-hatted? I guess than almost any of you!—Not so much as Oliver Cromwell ("the Hero as King") would ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... cure a disease the forms of which varied perpetually. He says that neurotic patients are the despair of science, for the causes of their conditions are only to be found in some as yet unexplored system. He advised me to have recourse to a physician who has been called a quack; but he carefully pointed out that this man was a stranger, a Polish Jew, a refugee, and that the Parisian doctors were extremely jealous of certain wonderful cures he had made, and also of the opinion expressed by many that he is very ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... notice. To being the last person informed (instead of the first) of Mr. Nugent Dubourg's exaggerated and absurd view of the case of his afflicted child. To the German surgeon, as being certainly a foreigner and a stranger, and possibly a quack. To the slur implied on British Surgery by bringing the foreigner to Dimchurch. To the expense involved in the same proceeding. Finally to the whole scope and object of Mr. Nugent Dubourg's proposal, which had for its origin rebellion against the decrees of an all-wise Providence, and for its ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... shrewdness in a person of capable intelligence to expose a pretender,—especially a quack, who appears in the "borrowed feathers" of assumed learning. Lawyers have so much of this stripping work to do that it forms their cheapest fun; but it is fun, nevertheless. ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... are those which never come. The world has outlived much, and will outlive a great deal more, and men have contrived to be happy in it. It has shown the strength of its constitution in nothing more than in surviving the quack medicines it has tried. In the scales of the destinies brawn will never weigh so much as brain. Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies, or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... things, if you like! But your old New England saints and dreamers are not your last word in America. They tell me your ancestral Protestantisms are fast breaking down. Your churches are turning into concert and lecture rooms. Catholicism is growing among you,—science gaining on the quack-medicines! But there—there—I'll not prate. Forgive me. This has been a fascinating half-hour. Only, take care! I have seen you a Catholic once, ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her father, telephoned to Delmas to take her to the Baldwyn Theatre, where she has engaged a box for this evening—fondly hoping that the diamonds will bring him up to the scratch, and that he will propose to her. When I saw her she was on her way to a notorious quack doctor and beauty specialist in Californian Street. She suffers from some nasty skin disease, and is in mortal terror lest Delmas should get to know of it, and also of the fact that all her teeth are false, and that two of ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... obnoxious. In the course of a speech delivered at a mass meeting of from fifteen to twenty thousand men at Waterford, in September, 1883, Michael Davitt said, "It was better for all concerned that the truth should be plainly and bluntly told, in order that English quack statesmen might be saved the trouble of proposing half measures to satisfy the Irish people.... Let the landlords of Ireland resign their unpopular positions, follow the example of Captain Boycott, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... whistle, place it against the roof of the mouth, tin side up, and with the edge of the rubber towards the front. When once wet, it will adhere to the roof of the mouth, and by skilful blowing, it can be made to send forth a most surprising variety of sounds. The quack of the duck and the song of the thrush may be made to follow each other in a single breath, and the squeal of a pig or the neigh of a horse are equally within its scope. In short, there is scarcely any animal, whether bird or quadruped, the cry of which may not be easily imitated by a skilful ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... to the nation itself, why, may the devil get me, (and I'm no friend of his,) if I don't think all that is needed to render it safe, is just to let it alone. Nor would it be much lost if some kindly disposed gentleman would kill off a few score of our Union savers, who, like quack doctors, go about with their pockets full of plasters, and are for ever hunting for the crack in the nation's skull. And I would advise all politicians to spin less patriotic yarns, to be more modest, to learn wisdom, to drink less whiskey; in truth, to think more of God and ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... quack!" came from out of the reeds, and a brown duck came sailing out, followed by ten little yellow balls of down with flat beaks, swimming like their mother, but in a hurried pop-and-go-one fashion, in and out, and round and round, and seeming to go through country dances on ...
— Young Robin Hood • G. Manville Fenn
... quack was heard, and at a distance the whole tribe were seen coming waddling home, their feathers gleaming in green and gold, and they themselves in high ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... uneducated, disinherited classes. The party of extreme measures is always chiefly constituted from the proletariat because it is the very poor who most pressingly feel the need for change and because they have not usually the education to judge the feasibility of the plans, many of them quack nostrums, presented as panaceas for all their woes. A complete break with the past and with the existing order has no terrors for them, but ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... was a-swimming, With his curly tail; The little man made it his mark, mark, mark! He let off his gun, But he fired too soon, And the drake flew away with a quack, quack, quack. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... accepted at Oxford and Cambridge. It is not possible to practise medicine, in a satisfactory way unless one is actually in possession of the qualification. Any one who does so, however well trained, ranks as a quack, and is not legally entitled to sign death certificates ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... phantom with 'Solomon's key' and other magic formulae, and at length, when he threatens it with the mystic formula of the Trinity, it dissolves into mist, and out of the mist steps forth Mephistopheles, dressed as a 'travelling scholar'—an itinerant professor, or quack doctor. ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... in an altered voice; "that thought is an insult. And even now, who knows if she really loves? does she know herself? She is enamored of genius, of the soul and intellect of that seller of verses, that literary quack; but she will study him, we shall all study him; and I know how to make the man's real character peep out from under that turtle-shell of fine manners,—we'll soon see the petty little head of his ambition and his vanity!" cried Butscha, ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... account of him in the European Magazine, Jan. 1786. BOSWELL. There we learn that he was in his time a grammar-school usher, actor, poet, the puffing partner in a quack medicine, and tutor to a youthful Earl. He was suspected of levying blackmail by threats of satiric publications, and he suffered from a disease which rendered him an object almost offensive to sight. He was born in 1738 or 1739, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... in the week or so, and tells me, or at least my Wife, all his news. The Roman revolution has made a man of him,—quite brightened up ever since;—and the best friend he ever saw, I believe, was that same Quack-President of France, who relieved him while it was ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... too, Missie! Lard, now I don't know how I'd be without I had me duck. Duckie I calls 'er and Duckie she is; company she is, too, to me mornin's, with her 'Quack, Quack,' ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... up in the air with a blood-curdling yell. The three of us fell back. We expected to be massacred. But that howling savage of sanguinary reputation sank back in the chair. He held his head in both his hands, and groaned and groaned and groaned. Nor would he listen to reason. I was a quack. My painless tooth-extraction was a delusion and a snare and a low advertising dodge. I was so anxious to get that tooth that I was almost ready to bribe him. But that went against my professional pride and I let him depart with the tooth still intact, the only case on record up to date of failure ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... of evil broke out early on him; and, part from flattery, part superstition, nothing would satisfy my lord and lady, especially the latter, but having the poor little cripple touched by his Majesty at his church. They were ready to cry out miracle at first (the doctors and quack-salvers being constantly in attendance on the child, and experimenting on his poor little body with every conceivable nostrum) but though there seemed, from some reason, a notable amelioration in the infant's health after his ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... occur ([Greek: b]) from neglect, not of the material instances wholly, but of some material facts in them, e.g. in cases of cures by quack remedies (such as Kenelm Digby's 'sympathetic powder'), of some attendant fact (as exclusion of air from a wound, rest, regimen, and the like) which really worked the cure. Sometimes the neglected fact is one ascertainable, not by the ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... attention to matters more useful to the human family—digging cellars, wheeling baggage, driving teams, &c. So lawyer Bunker turned his attention from Blackstone, Chitty, Coke on Littleton, and those fellows of deep-red, blue-black law, to the manufacture of quack nostrums. Bunker found that the great appetite we Yankees have for quack medicines, pills and powders, suffered no diminution in the gold country; on the contrary, the appetite became rather sharpened for those luxuries, and Bunker found that a New York butcher, with whom he became acquainted, ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... went to stay at Creteil, where he applied his method and made his famous magnetic pail, which interested M. d'Eslon, head doctor to the Comte d'Artois—later Charles X. He wrote about the magnetic pail. The Academy of Medicine warned him to be more cautious in speaking of quack inventions, and threatened to expel him from membership if he did not retract what he had written. That body even made a new rule to this effect: "No doctor declaring himself in favor of animal magnetism, either ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... very centre of Borrow's Norwich life was William Taylor, concerning whom we have already written much. It was a Jew named Mousha, a quack it appears, who pretended to know German and Hebrew, and had but a smattering of either language, who first introduced Borrow to Taylor, and there is a fine dialogue between the two in Lavengro, of which this ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... a motley crew! A royal prince; Spanish nobles; Italian counts; French marquises; Dutch chevaliers; and, I may proudly add, English gentlemen. We had also a quack doctor from Paris; a gaming-house-keeper from Milan; a clergyman, poor as an Apostle, from Iceland; a grim-looking student from the University of Goettingen; a Danish baron, music-mad; a singing count from ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... became a monk— (What vineyards have those priests!) And Gobbo to quack-salver sunk, To leech vile murrained beasts; And lazy Andre, blown off shore, Was picked up by the Turk, And in some harem, you be sure, Is forced at ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... large a sum go out of the family. Dinaea fell ill, and he brought her his own physician. The patient refused the man's services; they had been fatal, she said, to all her kinsfolk. Oppianicus then contrived to introduce to her a traveling quack from Ancona. He had bribed the man with about seventeen pounds of our money to administer a deadly drug. The fee was large, and the fellow was expected to take some pains with the business; but he was in a hurry; he had many markets to visit; and he gave a single dose ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... confiscated for any cause whatever. Great discontent existed among the people that Law had been suffered to escape. The mob and the Parliament would have been pleased to have seen him hanged. The few who had not suffered by the commercial revolution, rejoiced that the quack had left the country; but all those (and they were by far the most numerous class) whose fortunes were implicated, regretted that his intimate knowledge of the distress of the country, and of the causes that had led to it, had not been rendered more available ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Monsieur Haudry. The old man was a physician of the school of Moliere, a great practitioner and in favor of the old-fashioned formulas, who dosed his patients neither more nor less than a quack, consulting physician though he was. He came, studied the expression of Cesar's face, and observing symptoms of cerebral congestion, ordered an immediate application of mustard plasters to ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... was splendidly bright, and the sun shone on all the green trees. The Mother Duck went down to the water with all her little ones. Splash! she jumped into the water. "Quack! quack!" she said, and then one duckling after another plunged in. The water closed over their heads, but they came up in an instant and swam capitally; their legs went of themselves, and there they were, all in the water. The ugly gray ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... fatuous practice. The monarch selected to preside over the functions of human life was the Liver; and it is only with bated breath that any doctor dares question the legitimacy of that monarch's claim. The loyal subjects of King Liver are ever ready to call out "quack," "charlatan," etc., to those who dare repudiate the sovereignty of ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... learned many things since those days," Rochester declared. "You have acquired the knack of glib speech. You have become a past master in the arts which go to the ensnaring of over-imaginative women. You have mixed with quack spiritualists and self-styled professors of what they term occultism. Go and practise your arts where you will, but remember what I have told you. Remember the person's name which I have mentioned. Remember it, obey what I have said, and you may fool the whole world. Forget ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the polished table, after draining it to the bottom. "I would like to go through that mob again! and I would pull an oar in the galleys of Marseilles rather than be questioned with that air of authority by a botanizing quack like La Galissoniere! Such villainous questions as he asked me about the state of the royal magazines! La Galissoniere had more the air of a judge cross-examining a culprit than of a Governor asking information of a ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the comparative philologists that this was impossible, because the languages spoken through that wide region, demonstrated that its inhabitants must have had a common descent, he could only answer that as ducks quack everywhere, he could not see why men should not ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... the present moment than the fortunes of WILLIAM OF ORANGE, and if Miss MARJORIE BOWEN'S Prince and Heretic (METHUEN) shows some traces of having been rather hastily finished it is easy to pardon this defect. The alchemist's assistant, part seer and part quack, whom she introduces into the earlier part of the story foretells the violent deaths of the young princes of the house of Nassau and the ravaging and looting of the Netherlands by ALVA, Defender of the Catholic Faith and servant of the House of Hapsburg; but he cannot ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... here Elixir of Long Life, I might embellish it with a great many high-sounding epithets; but I disdain to follow the example of every illiterate vagabond, that, from idleness, turns quack, and advertises his nostrum in the public papers. I am neither a felonious drysalter returned from exile, an hospital stump-turner, a decayed staymaker, a bankrupt printer, or insolvent debtor, released by act of parliament. I do not pretend to administer medicines without the least ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... example, in Caliban upon Setebos, the Grammarian's Funeral, My Last Duchess, and Mr. Sludge, the Medium. These are all psychological studies, in which the poet gets into the inner consciousness of a monster, a pedant, a criminal, and a quack, and gives their point of view. They are dramatic soliloquies; but the poet's self-identification with each of his creations, in turn, remains incomplete. His curious, analytic observation, his way of looking at the soul from outside, gives a doubleness to the monologues in his Dramatic ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... attended to business, refused assistance, and forbade any one not called by him to enter his room. Only the quick coming of death prevented him from ending his life with a crime; for in a fit of anger at the curandero, a sort of quack doctor who attended him, he sprang from his bed, snatched up his sword, and rushed furiously upon the trembling wretch. Before he could reach his intended victim he fell down in a fit of apoplexy. No one dared to disregard his orders and ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... stamped bindings of the sixteenth century; several volumes of Chinese, marbled, and other papers; early almanacks; a quantity of engravings of towns, costumes, trades, furniture, etc.; curious advertisements of tobacco, tea, quack medicines, etc.; specimens of fine writing; and many other miscellaneous papers of ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... life trained every man to a certain extent in physicking, and the yearly invoice sent to London always ordered such drugs as were needed,—ipecacuanha, jalap, Venice treacle, rhubarb, diacordium, etc., as well as medicines for horses and dogs. In 1755 Washington received great benefit from one quack medicine, "Dr. James's Powders;" he once bought a quantity of another, "Godfrey's Cordial;" and at a later time Mrs. Washington tried a third, "Annatipic Pills." More unenlightened still was a treatment prescribed for Patsy Custis, when "Joshua ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... great public square in the midst of the city. The courthouse was on one side, and over the door there was a sign which read "The Hall of Justice." Everybody seemed to be at the fair: peasants, nobles, soldiers, and citizens; rope-dancers, quack doctors, waxworks, showmen of all sorts, and bells rang and flags flew, and altogether it was just the thing ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... statement: the women who are urging to-day the question of education are often accused of presenting education in the light of a quack medicine which is warranted to cure all troubles. And it is true that we do so present it, for the broader grows our experience of men and women, and the more deeply and widely we think, the more inevitably do we find this problem of education ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... Read, a quack who advertised largely in the Tatler and other papers. He was satirised in No. 547 of the Spectator. In 1705 he was knighted for his services in curing many seamen and soldiers of blindness gratis, and he was ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... subscribers. You a patriot? You are a humbug. Look at those advertisements, and deny it if you can. Crying out for education, and helping to debauch the public mind with Voltaire's 'Candide,' and Eugene Sue—swearing by Jesus, and puffing Atheism and blasphemy—yelling at a quack government, quack law, quack priesthoods, and then dirtying your fingers with half-crowns for advertising Holloway's ointment and Parr's life pills—shrieking about slavery of labour to capital, and inserting Moses and Son's doggerel—ranting ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... aggregate marks made an average per term of 981/2, mine being 981/4. But as he always held me in disrespect on account of my father's occupation, and as assiduously paid court and gave good reports to the sons of wealthy men, there was a mutual aversion. He gave max. that term to the son of a famous quack doctor, who always came to me to be crammed for the recitation, while I got 98. Naturally we had little ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... soil great Rome was sown; Our England her foundations laid:— Hence, while the nations, change-dismay'd, To tyrant or to quack repair, A healthier heart we own, And the plant ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... of complete silence followed the asking of the blessing, then, as Edward took up a carving-knife, and stuck the fork into a roast duck in front of him, there was a loud "Quack, quack," that startled everybody for an instant, followed by merry peals of laughter ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... his way back from the pond of Paddy the Beaver deep in the Green Forest. He had just seen Mr. and Mrs. Quack start toward the Big River for a brief visit before leaving on their long, difficult journey to the far-away Southland. Farewells are always rather sad, and this particular farewell had left Peter with a lump in ...
— The Adventures of Lightfoot the Deer • Thornton W. Burgess
... letter, though shattered by the sharp shot of Dr Horne of Oxford's wit, in the character of 'One of the People called Christians', is still prefixed to Mr Home's excellent History of England, like a poor invalid on the piquet guard, or like a list of quack medicines sold by the same bookseller, by whom a work of whatever nature is published; for it has no connection with his History, let it have what it may with what are called his Philosophical Works. A worthy friend of mine in London was lately consulted by a lady of quality, of ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... either a consequence of this knowledge, or the effects of observation and experience. The powers of a somnambule extend equally to the morale as well as to the physique. In this respect a phrenologist is a pure quack in comparison with a lady in a trance. The latter has no dependence on bumps and organs, but she looks right through you, at a glance, and pronounces ex cathedra, whether you are a rogue, or an honest man; a well-disposed, or an evil-disposed child of Adam. In this particular, ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... quack, and, above all, that of acrid-quack. 'These,' says Carlyle, 'though never so clear-starched, bland-smiling, and beneficent, he absolutely would have no trade with. Their very sugar-cake was unavailing. He said with emphasis, as clearly as barking could say it, "Acrid-quack, avaunt!"' But once when 'a tall, irregular, busy-looking man came halting by,' that wise, nervous little dog ran towards him, and began 'fawning, frisking, licking at the feet' of Sir Walter Scott. No reader of reviews could have done ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... as indeed all the physicians here did, except Dr. Maty. In my opinion, you have no gout, but a very scorbutic and rheumatic habit of body, which should be treated in a very different manner from the gout; and, as I pretend to be a very good quack at least, I would prescribe to you a strict milk diet, with the seeds, such as rice, sago, barley, millet, etc., for the three summer months at least, and without ever tasting wine. If climate signifies anything (in which, by the way, I have very little faith), you are, in my mind, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... acquire applause, Try various arts to get a doubtful cause; Or, as a dancing master in a jigg, With various steps instructs the dancing prig; Or as a doctor writes you different bills; Or as a quack prescribes you different pills; Or as a fiddler plays more tunes than one; Or as a baker bakes more bread than brown; Or as a tumbler tumbles up and down; So does our author, rummaging his brain, By various ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... sailed in. The hen set up such a din and clatter that Mrs. Gerome, who happened to get a glimpse of them, felt sorry for the poor frightened fowl, and tried to drive the little ones out of the water; but, whenever she put her hand towards them to catch the nearest, the whole brood would quack and dive,—and, when she had laughed that one short laugh, she called to me to look after them and went back to the house. You don't know ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... deaf to the babble of our new acquaintance. He was clearly a confirmed hypochondriac, and I was dreamily conscious that he was pouring forth interminable trains of symptoms, and imploring information as to the composition and action of innumerable quack nostrums, some of which he bore about in a leather case in his pocket. I trust that he may not remember any of the answers which I gave him that night. Holmes declares that he overheard me caution him against ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with a grave face, "you would not compare the spiritual Christian, such as Luther, holding his cardinal doctrine about justification, to any such formal, legal, superstitious devotee as Popery can make, with its carnal rites and quack remedies, which never really cleanse the soul ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... wore on, but the testimonial-hunter did not reappear. Early on the next morning, however, his pale, thin face and emaciated brows were visible in the shop of the quack-doctor. ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... was communicated by Darwin to Romanes. One of his children who was just beginning to speak, called a duck a "quack." By an appreciation of the resemblance of qualities it next extended the term "quack" to denote all birds and insects on the one hand, and all fluid objects on the other. Lastly, by a still more delicate appreciation of resemblance the child called all coins "quack" because on ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... darkness, and expectancy, anything may seem to happen. But Dr. Carpenter wholly omits such cases as that of Mr. Hamilton Aide, and of M. Alphonse Karr. Both were absolutely sceptical. Both disliked Home very much, and thought him an underbred Yankee quack and charlatan. Both were in the 'expectancy' of seeing no marvels, were under 'the dominant idea' that nothing unusual would occur. Both, in a brilliantly lighted room of a villa near Nice, saw a chair make a rush from the wall into the middle of the room, and saw a very ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... may be thou art fallen out with mankind, and intendest to turn quack; or as they call it in ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... ducklings were very, very ill, Their mother sent for Dr. Quack, who gave them each a pill, But soon as they recovered, the first thing that they did Was to peck the Ancient Gander, till he ran away ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... veterinary profession, who do not look to the betterment of the animal's condition. The owner of the animal, not being able to see the condition of the animal's teeth for himself, is persuaded into having the animal's teeth worked on regardless of whether it is needed or not. The quack or transient Veterinarian will pull and crack healthy, sound teeth, and also lacerate the poor animal's mouth. Be sure the Veterinarian employed for this ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... feet deep, lies on his back A cobbler, starmonger, and quack; Who to the stars, in pure good will, Does to his best look upward still. Weep, all you customers that use His pills, his almanacks, or shoes; And you that did your fortunes seek, Step to his grave but once a-week; This earth, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... absence of penetrating criticism, any impudent industrious person may set up as an "expert," organise and direct the confused good intentions at large, and muddle disastrously with the problem in hand. The "expert" quack and the bureaucratic intriguer increase and multiply in a dull-minded, uncritical, strenuous period as disease germs multiply in darkness ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... the lower animals knows enough to let this poisonous, acrid plant alone; but not so man, who formerly made a quack medicine from it in the days when a drug that set one's internal organism on fire was supposed to be especially beneficial. One taste of the plant gives a realizing sense of its value as an emetic. How the red man enjoyed smoking and chewing the bitter leaves, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... beginning of the year had been attacked by a severe and deep-seated fever, to which was added the gout, a hereditary ailment in his family. He had found at last that the draughts containing dissolved pearls which the quack doctor, Leoni di Spoleto, prescribed for him (as if he desired to adapt his remedies rather to the riches of his patient than to his necessities) were useless and unavailing, and so he had come to understand that he must part from those ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... they are not noxious to some animals is plain, for ducks, buzzards, owls, stone-curlews, and snakes, eat them, to my knowledge, with impunity. And I well remember the time, but was not eye-witness to the fact (though numbers of persons were), when a quack, at this village, ate a toad to make the country people ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... from her I learnt what I have just related. M. Quesnay said, talking of the pearls, "They are produced by a disease in the oyster. It is possible to know the cause of it; but, be that as it may, he is not the less a quack, since he pretends to have the elixir vitoe, and to have lived several centuries. Our master is, however, infatuated by him, and sometimes talks of him as if his ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... from his toils to relax, The scourge of impostors, the terror of quacks: 80 Come, all ye quack bards, and ye quacking divines, Come, and dance on the spot where your tyrant reclines: When Satire and Censure encircl'd his throne, I fear'd for your safety, I fear'd for my own; But now he is gone, and we want a detector, 85 Our Dodds ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... through underground stems or rhizomes like quack-grass, Johnsongrass, bittersweet, and the like ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... out, and reported to George Bickley, a miserable quack and 'confidence man,' a person long familiarly spoken of by the press as a mere Jeremy Diddler, but who has been a useful tool to shrewder men in managing for them this precious Order. The member is to do all in his power to 'build up a public sentiment in his State favorable to the K.G.C., ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... not a respectable man, I understand, this Grimshawe,—a quack, intemperate, always in these scuffles: let him get out as ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "Ah, so now you are to have Kaffee Klatsch with the Princess. I told you so. The lady is in love with you, and the Emperor is going to offer you her hand in marriage after he has bestowed on you an Iron Cross in return for one of your quack medicines." ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... repay me for his daughter's life. She is one of the wealthiest heiresses in Europe, and she was at the brink of death when I found her on the road to Savoy. If I were to tell you how I cured that young lady, you would take me for a quack. Aha! that is the sound of the bells on the horses and the rumbling of a wagon; it is coming along this way; let us see, perhaps that is Vigneau himself; and if so, take a good ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... on his foot With sulphurous oath and kick in flank, what time The cart-chain clinks across the slanting shaft, And, kitchenward, the rattling bucket plumps Souse down the well, where quivering ducks quack loud, And Susan Cook is singing. Up the sky The hesitating moon slow trembles on, Faint as a new-washed soul but lately up From out a buried body. Far about, A hundred slopes in hundred fantasies Most ravishingly run, so smooth of curve That I but seem to see the fluent plain Rise toward ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... the disposal of the crown, the poor boy-king lay there almost neglected, or watched only by those who waited the moment of his death with impatience. As the disease took deeper and fatal hold of him, all forsook him save an incompetent quack nurse; and how far she may have helped on the end no one ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... a sudden change of countenance. "I shall be von more name and date to make harter t'e student's lessons and longer t'e tables—t'at is gratitude! Vit' t'e vorld we haf at present no concern. For t'is, indeed, you bless me—t'at I am not a quack to make public an incomplete discofery, for ot'er quacks to do mischief. You are glad t'at it is vit' you alone I concern myself. But you are not grateful; you are happy because I say t'at you shall be yet more beautiful; t'at ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark |
