The Quack — Fake Healthcare for Gullible Public

1915

"Every age has its quacks, its fakers, its fortune-tellers with their countless vicitms," says Leslie's Weekly.

"Newspapers expose the quacks, the postoffice department denounces the fakers and get-rich-quick schemers but the newspapers are filled with the advertisements of quack medicines and the postoffices with the prospectuses of the get-rich-quick schemers.

"The campaign of education goes on, however. The public is learning. Analyses of quack medicines show them, in many instances, to be made up of water, salt and other cheap ingredients. A bottle that costs a few cents sells for a dollar.

"The gullible public swallows the quack medicines and the manufacturers of the so-called 'remedies' revel in millions.

"The sick always want to get well. Anything that deadens pain, even for a moment, is promptly accepted as a remedy, though, in the end suffering is intensified and sickness prolonged.

"The last resort is the doctor, the practiced, experienced physician — the one who should have been consulted first. Often he comes too late. The quack medicine may have done its work, but the doctor must take the blame.

"It is not strange that the sick get impatient to recover their health, nor that they can be so easily imposed upon, but experience should teach its valuable lesson. Yet it doesn't, for if it did quacks would disappear, the fakers would fade away and the get-rich-quick schemers be heard of no more.

"But for the credulity of mankind — a credulity often based upon ignorance — we should have a healthier, wealthier and a happier people.

"As we have quack remedies for human ills, so we have quacks prescribing for all the ills of society and taking the places of elder statesmen who ought to be first.

"So the loud-mouthed demagogue, the persuasive pleader for the rights of 'the common people', the fakers of politics, the 'sockless Simpsons' and the 'Mother Joneses,' are knocking at the door of the White House, intruding upon the makers of party platforms and publishing their preposterous vaporings in the columns of a sensational press.

"The statesmen must take a back seat until the people have tried the quack remedies and witnessed the results. We are witnessing some of the natural results in the revival of the soup houses, the crowding of municipal lodging places and all the employment agencies, while engines are still and factories cutting down their payrolls.

"In our legislative halls the quacks and the fakers are pressing new and still newer remedies upon legislators. As a result we are having experimental legislation at the expense of the taxpayer. If one experiment fails, try another, just as one quack remedy is replaced by a worse one. The taxpayer foots the bills, until patience ceases to be a virtue and then, in their wrath, they will rise, cast out the quacks and beseech the elder statesmen to resume the reins of government.

"Experience still continues to the best schoolmaster."

Great Medical Science Had Quacks As Foundation

1916

German Science, So Famous Today, Is Credited With Exceedingly Modest Beginning

German medical science is world-famed and has proved a godsend to mankind. Yet the science may be said to have been founded by the quacks of former centuries, for while quackery has always flourished in all countries, Germany was long the leader in turning out practitioners of this dubious profession.

They were often men of imagination akin to genius, and they traveled all over Europe. A majority of the celebrated quacks of England were Germans, and their methods of advertising their "cures" were very similar to those of the "Indian medicine men" who still flourish in the rural districts of America.

"Having studied over Galen, Hypocrates, Albumazer, and Paracelsus, I am now become the Esculapius of the age," modestly announced one medieval quack, according to an early play, "having been educated at twelve kingdoms and been counselor to the counselors of several monarchs. By the earnest prayers of several lords, earls, dukes and honorable personages I have been at last prevailed upon to oblige the world with the notice: That all persons, young and old, blind or lame, deaf, or dumb, curable or incurable, may know where to repair for cure in all cephalalgias, paralytic paroxysms, palpitations of the pericardium, empyemas, syncopes and nasieties, arising either from a plethory or a cachochymy, veryiginous vapors, hydrocephalous exacerbation, odontalgic or podagrical inflammations and the entire legion of tethnerous distempers.

"This is nature's palladium, health's magazine, and it works seven manner of ways, as nature requires, for it scorns to be confined to any particular mode of operation."

Yet from those quacks arose the mighty army of German scientists whose researches have been the marvel and the benefaction of the whole world.