"Quack" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wrestling, or shooting at a mark with cross-bows. There, girls and boys were dancing to the sound of a pipe, or still smaller children were playing at marbles, or amusing themselves with the toys they had just purchased. Not far from these, a quack from one scaffold was descanting on the virtues of his medicines, whilst a preacher from another was holding forth to the graver part of the crowd, the joys and terrors of another life; and yet farther on, a motley groupe were listening to a blind beggar, who was ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... jumping-jacks, was a traitor to the Constitution and a secret agent of the Wilhelmstrasse. And thus there were American pathologists and bacteriologists who denounced Prof. Dr. Paul Ehrlich as little better than a quack hired by the Krupps to poison Americans, and who displayed their pious horror of the late Prof. Dr. Robert Koch by omitting all acknowledgment of obligation to him from their monographs. And finally ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... At p. 318 is narrated the commencement of his acquaintance with the famous Arise Evans, a Welsh prophet: whose "Echo from Heaven," &c., 2 parts, 1652, 12mo., is a work noticed by Warburton, and coveted by bibliomaniacs. Yet one more quack-medicine entry: "March 11, 1681. I took early in the morning a good dose of Elixir, and hung three spiders about my neck, and they drove my ague away—Deo gratias!" p. 359. It seems that Ashmole always punctually kept "The Astrologer's Feast;" and that he had such celebrity as a curer ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of yonder quack Who stuffs the ears of all that pass. I—I alone can show that black Is ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... accepted as such. He appears now as a merchant, then a soldier, again as a seafaring man; to-day a Turk, to-morrow a Greek. He once came out as a Polish count, then as the betrothed of a Russian princess, and again as a quack doctor, who cured all maladies with his pills. What his real profession may be no one knows. But one thing is certain, he is a paid spy. Whether in the service of the Turks, Austrians, or Russians, who can tell? Perhaps he is in ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... the son of King Charles VII, must hear this sort of thing from a quack doctor! I have always liked people of low rank; Olivier the barber ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... constant stream of strange vagabonds drifted along the road: minstrels who wandered from fair to fair, a foul and pestilent crew; jugglers and acrobats, quack doctors and tooth-drawers, students and beggars, free workmen in search of better wages, and escaped bondsmen who would welcome any wages at all. Such was the throng which set the old road smoking in a haze of white dust from Winchester to ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... wor a varry nooated chap i' some pairts o' Yorkshire. He wor an old chap, an' lived in a little haase to hissen, an' gate a livin' wi' quack-docterin' a bit; an' whativer anybody ailed, he'd some pills at wor sure to cure 'em; soa, as John had been sufferin' a long' time, he thought he'd goa an' have a bit o' tawk wi' him, an' see if he ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... tones. "I will tell you what happened, tho' I have it at second hand, being in the North, as you may remember. Grafton came in from Kent and invested Marlboro' Street. He himself broke the news to Mr. Carvel, who took to his bed. Leiden was not in attendance, you may be sure, but that quack-doctor Drake. Swain sent me a message, and I killed a horse getting here from New York. But I could no more gain admittance to your grandfather, Richard, than to King George the Third. I was met in the hall by that crocodile, who told me with too many fair words that I could ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... quacks such as you might see at any fair in Europe—quack dentists, quack medicine-men, men with ointments for healing sores, men with pills, and little bottles of bright liquid, and tricks for ruptures and broken legs and arms. A little way beyond them were the pedlars. Here were the wildest men in the world. ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... minister, Bourbon, Rule by bayonets, bribes, and spies, Charlatans in church and throne, France is opening all her eyes— Down go minion, king, and quack, We'll ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... (1745-1794); a noted quack doctor. Returning from America, he claimed to have learned marvellous electrical cures from Franklin, and advertised impossible discoveries; he declared he could impart the secret of living beyond the natural span of life. He became fashionable, received testimonials from many well-known ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... ridiculous stuff these oracles of the devil pleased and satisfied the people I really know not, but certain it is that innumerable attendants crowded about their doors every day. And if but a grave fellow in a velvet jacket, a band, and a black coat, which was the habit those quack-conjurers generally went in, was but seen in the streets the people would follow them in crowds, and ask them questions as ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... "Quack! quack!" said the duck; and all the babies quacked too. Then they looked all around. The mother let them look as much as they liked, for green ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... 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, ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... told by 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 everywhere speak the ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... fourteen years of age had just been carried off to the hospital with his foot cut clean off at the ankle by one of these marine monsters. His family were howling with fury. They wished to keep the youngster with them. The negro quack doctor pretended that he could have cured him in two days, and that the white "quacks" would leave him for a ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... made a life-long resistance. It was the beginning of a battle which has ever since held its ground in New England, to "enjoy poor health," yet be ready for every emergency, being a state of things on which the average woman rather prides herself, medicine, quack or home- brewed, ranking in importance ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... stole away from the house, and whereas no one could find him, we feared for a long time that he had done himself a mischief. Nevertheless he was alive and of good heart. He had passed the months in a various life; first as a crier to a wandering quack, and afterwards, inasmuch as he was a nimble and likely lad, he had waited on the guests at one of the best frequented inns at Wurzberg. It came then to pass that his eminence Cardinal Branda, Nuncio from his Holiness the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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 this grave, but once a week! This earth which ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... any thing. I'll vamp it, and tip you the cole: I'll pawn it, and give you the money. Also to refit, new dress, or rub up old hats, shoes or other wearing apparel; likewise to put new feet to old boots. Applied more particularly to a quack bookseller. ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... that they look a fright in eyeglasses, and ask if they should wear them. Most certainly if the eyes are worn out and failing. An oculist of the very best reputation should be consulted. The fee does not exceed that of the quack, and the eyes are tested with greater thoroughness. Glasses must be chosen with the utmost care, as ill-fitting lenses can make a great deal of trouble. They are worse than no glasses at all. Then, after eyeglasses are put ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... insignificant. Some of them have great historical, or economic, or intellectual value; others are as nearly worthless as it is possible for any printed matter to be. Why should you treat a pamphlet upon Pears's soap, or a quack medicine, or advertising the Columbia bicycle, with the same attention which you would naturally give to an essay on international politics by Gladstone, or a review of the Cuban question by a prominent Spaniard, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... yourself an exile, in the East; but in the West too it is exile; I know not where under the sun it is not exile. Here in the Fog Babylon, amid mud and smoke, in the infinite din of 'vociferous platitude,' and quack outbellowing quack, with truth and pity on all hands ground under the wheels, can one call it a home, or a world? It is a waste chaos, where we have to swim painfully for our life. The utmost a man can do is to swim there like a man, ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... present himself at Browndown at a moment's 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 ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... of the poorer and more ignorant classes; who, as if poverty were not a sufficient misery in itself, are ever ready to embitter it by litigation. These, like quacks in medicine, excite the malady to profit by the cure, and retard the cure to augment the fees. As the quack exhausts the constitution the pettifogger exhausts the purse; and as he who has once been under the hands of a quack is for ever after prone to dabble in drugs, and poison himself with infallible prescriptions, so the client of the pettifogger is ever after prone ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... 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 Majesty touched him, in a few weeks afterward the ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... insufferable, the heat is intolerable, the door-keepers let the people keep shuffling in, the ducks in the corner are going quack, quack, quack, here's a little girl being tried for her life, and the judge can't hear a word that's said. Bring me my black cap, and I'll condemn ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... knows, rice is a crop that must be grown under water. After the rice harvest, these swampy fields are naturally full of fallen grain, and thrifty John Chinaman feeds immense flocks of ducks on the stubbles of the paddy-fields. The ducks are brought down by thousands in junks, and quack and gobble to their hearts' content in the fields all day, waddling back over a plank to their junks at night. At sunset, one of the most comical sights in the world can be witnessed. A Chinese boy comes ashore from each junk with a horn, which he blows ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... finished better than he began, but truthfulness and honesty were not conspicuous virtues of his. He lied, broke faith, and plundered wherever and whenever it suited his purpose, and some of his other vices were unspeakable. There is no doubt he was both a quack and a coward when he broke the Pragmatic Sanction and began to steal the territory of Maria Theresa. The powers of England, France, Spain, Russia, Poland, Prussia, Sweden, Denmark, the Germanic body, all had agreed by ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... like pigs in a stye, or like hungry curs of all sorts of mis-begotten and degenerate breeds. I believe that the famous Mr. WEBB HALL, who was then a practising attorney in Bristol (of the firm of Jarman and Hall); I believe that this profound agricultural quack of 1821, was, in 1812, one of the formidable phalanx which was ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... it was late or early. The candles had all burned out. Dolly had just been in the study and had suggested to the doctor that he should lie down. Levin sat listening to the doctor's stories of a quack mesmerizer and looking at the ashes of his cigarette. There had been a period of repose, and he had sunk into oblivion. He had completely forgotten what was going on now. He heard the doctor's chat and ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... 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 ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Pictet of Geneva. Marcellus, the private physician of the Roman Emperor Theodosius, was a Gaul born in Aquitane, and hence, it is believed, was intimately acquainted with the Gaulish or Celtic language of that province. He left a work on quack medicines (De Medicamentis Empiricis), written probably near the end of the fourth century. This work contains, amongst other things, a number of word-charms, or superstitious cure-formulas, that were, till lately, ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... 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 ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... the concertina played "Matamoras," Jones continued his lyric, when two Mexicans leaped at each other, and the concertina stopped with a quack. ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... Brunclough Lane, but by means of many out-of-the-way inquiries he discovered the name of the doctor who attended the Dodsons in case of illness. He found out, too, that this doctor was not a fully qualified medical practitioner. Lancashire is a very Mecca for quack doctors. Long years ago, before legislation became stringent in this direction, many unqualified men earned large incomes among the factory hands. Herbalists of all sorts and men who pretended to cure diseases which baffled all the doctors were in ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... Merton, smiling. He felt rather as if he were being treated like a quack doctor, to whom people (if foolish enough) appeal only as the ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... "Quack-quack! Take me out! Oh, take me out!" cried poor Fluffy-dumpty. The other six ducks crowded around and looked down ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... 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, ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... of him on the part of the public arose chiefly from the two causes to which I have referred—from the facts that he is neither a man of wealth nor a quack; but these are insufficient to account for the whole effect. No small portion of it is attributable to the very marked idiosyncrasy of Mr. Hawthorne himself. In one sense, and in great measure, to be peculiar is ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... them; the old man, clearly, was a favorite of Fortune; Fan their master himself must deal with him. So they sent word ahead, and brought him to the palace of Fan. Who understood well the limitations of quack magic: if he was to be beaten at these tricks, where would his influence be? So he heaped up riches in the courtyard, and made a great fire all round.—"Anyone can have those things," he announced, "who will go in and get them." Shang quietly walked through the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... fifteen dollars a box. At the same time he would be assured that his lady friend was merely suffering from "an obstruction arising from cold." If he insisted on explaining, the hard face of the quack would grow darker and harder, and a mysterious gleam of intelligence would shoot from the speculative ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... It may be said to the discredit of this king, that the only reward he would grant the indefatigable Stowe, in his days of old age and want, was the royal permission to beg; but no one will blame him for neglecting such a quack as John Dee. He died in 1608, in the eighty-first year of his age, and was buried ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... the mamma duck. She was Mrs. Wibblewobble, a nice, white duck, being a cousin to Mrs. Quack-Quack, who once rescued Billie and Johnnie Bushytail, and Jennie Chipmunk from the desert island where they had been ...
— Lulu, Alice and Jimmie Wibblewobble • Howard R. Garis
... doctor?" asked the porter. "She has something to do besides curing sick starvelings. Besides, that is not her office. Go to Imhotep or to Chunsu the counsellor, or to the great Techuti herself, who helps the sick. There is no quack medicine ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... thou art fallen out with mankind, and intendest to turn quack; or as they call it ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... told me, in the grand manner, that this phase of his career was distasteful to him. But I scarcely believe it. If ever a man loved to talk, it was Aristide Pujol; and what profession, save that of an advocate, offers more occasion for wheedling loquacity than that of a public vendor of quack medicaments? As a matter of fact, he revelled in it. When he offered a free box of the cure to the first lady who confessed the need thereof, and a blushing wench came forward, the rascal revelled in the opportunity for badinage which set the good-humoured crowd ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... and of trees speaking. But, if they don't, they do as well as most speaking, writing, poetry, sermons—or rather they do a great deal better. I should say indeed that those old dryad-reminiscences are quite as true as any, and profounder than most reminiscences we get. ("Cut this out," as the quack mediciners say, and keep by you.) Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more of those voiceless companions, and read the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... clergyman of that place, to put the people upon their guard, took occasion to point out to them the pernicious tendency of Whitfield's wild doctrines and irregular manner of life. He represented him as a religious impostor or quack, who had an excellent knack of setting off to advantage his poisonous tenets. On the other hand, Whitfield, who had been accustomed to bear reproach and face opposition, recriminated with double acrimony and greater ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's life on allegories; men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks. Let us try if, leaving out both the quack theory and the allegory one, and listening with affectionate attention to that far-off confused rumour of the Pagan ages, we cannot ascertain so much as this at least, That there was a kind of fact at the heart of them; that they too were ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... it never dives for food. It feeds on seeds of grasses, fibrous roots of plants, worms, shell fish, and insects. In feeding in shallow water the bird keeps the hind part of its body erect, while it searches the muddy bottom with its bill. When alarmed and made to fly, it utters a loud quack, the cry of the female being the louder. "It feeds silently, but after hunger is satisfied, it amuses itself with various jabberings, swims about, moves its head backward and forward, throws water over its back, shoots along the surface, half flying, half running, and ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography [July 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... anatomy, and how could that be acquired except at a medical school? It was every day more evident that if I continued in my position I should reach my majority without being trained for any life but that of a quack. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... part, have but one pre-occupation; they must search all round and upon every side, and grope for some central conception which is to explain and justify the most extreme details; until that is found, the politician is an enigma, or perhaps a quack, and the part a tissue of fustian sentiment and big words; but once that is found, all enters into a plan, a human nature appears, the politician or the stage-king is understood from point to point, from end to end. This is a degree of trouble which will be gladly taken by a very humble ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sacred to the practical man of the present age, especially when he happens to dwell on the other side of the Atlantic. There he uses the wonders of Nature as advertising boards for puffing quack medicines or patent stoves, and the picturesque and the grandiose are only appreciated by him in proportion to ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... grassy slopes, the Tsomass ends. When they approached the river mouth, they saw extending from the bank a salmon trap, and even to-day, the Indians will show at Lup-se-kup-se some old rotten sticks, which they affirm formed part of that same trap. The land was green, the wild duck's quack was heard among the reeds which edged the river bank, while flocks of geese were feeding on the grass which grows thickly upon the tidal flats, the ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael
... into steering us to one of the side channels. We were not expected. An old mother duck was directly across our path teaching some twenty-two little black hobbling downy babies how to swim. With a cry that shrieked "Leg it—leg it" plain as a quack could speak and which sent the little fellows scuttling, half swim, half run, the old mother flung herself over on her back not a paddle's length ahead of us, dipped, dived, came up again just at our bow and flopped broken-winged over ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... began to go a sort of bustle among the bulrushes; a wild duck flew up with a quack, another followed, and soon over the whole surface of the marsh a great cloud of birds hung screaming and circling in the air. I judged at once that some of my shipmates must be drawing near along the borders of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... usual under the title Penhallow and Bradshaw, Attorneys at Law. Then came the standing professional card of Dr. Lemuel Hurlbut and Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut, the medical patriarch of the town and his son. Following this, hideous quack advertisements, some of them with the certificates of Honorables, Esquires, and Clergymen.—Then a cow, strayed or stolen from the subscriber.—Then the advertisement referred to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... for the journalists, I refuse to be photographed, and I am not likely to accept the invitations. It takes my two secretaries half their time to wade through my correspondence and to decide which of it is to be pitched into the waste-paper basket. I am not a dealer in quack remedies, or an actor. I ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... democracy who should solve their common problems in terms of the evidence presented. The unthinking acceptance of the words of the book or the statement of the teacher prepares the way for the blind following of the boss, for faith in the demagogue, or even for acceptance of the statements of the quack. ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... 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 ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... would you do if asked to hold a consultation with a practitioner whom you have every reason to suppose an incapable quack? ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... in the marsh; and there was something else which Mildred did not seem to like. While George was quack-quacking, and making himself as like a little goose as he could, Mildred softly called to Ailwin, and beckoned her to the hedge. Ailwin came, swinging the great spade in her right hand, as easily as Mildred ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... who built up a house; K was a King, so mighty and grand; L was a Lady, who had a white hand; M was a Miser, and hoarded his gold; N was a Nobleman, gallant and bold; O was an Oysterman, who went about town; P was a Parson, and wore a black gown; Q was a Quack, with a wonderful pill; R was a Robber, who wanted to kill; S was a Sailor, who spent all he got; T was a Tinker, and mended a pot; U was an Usurer, a miserable elf; V was a Vintner, who drank all himself; W was a Watchman, who ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... of the waste-basket and handed to the general an eighteen by twenty-four sheet, poorly printed on cheap paper, with a "patent" inside, a number of advertisements of proprietary medicines, quack doctors, and fortune-tellers, and two or three columns of editorial and local news. Candor compels the admission that it was not an impressive sheet in any respect, except when regarded as the first local effort of a struggling people to make public expression of their life and ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... should require something more than exaggerated and personal assurances. In every village there are terrible butchers of vines and fruit-trees, who have some crude system of their own. They are as ignorant of the true science of the subject as a quack doctor of medicine, and, like the dispenser of nostrums, they claim to be infallible. Skilful pruning and training is really a fine art, which cannot be learned in a day or a year. It is like a surgical operation, requiring but little time, yet representing ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... cures for indigestion, I assure you, my dear boy. I wonder whether one can rely upon the authenticity of those signatures? I see no reason why there should be no cure for such a disease?—Eh? And it's just one of the things a quack, as they call them, would hit upon sooner than one who is in the beaten track. Do you know, Richard, my dear boy, I've often thought that if we could by any means appropriate to our use some of the extraordinary digestive power that a boa constrictor ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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. ...
— The Real Mother Goose • (Illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright)
... not wholly 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, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... as a "depraved quack," and says that the time he spent with him was worse than wasted. If Saint-Simon was the rogue and pretender that Comte avers, it is no certificate of Comte's insight that it took him four years ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... as a resort, over any south coast town we had yet seen. It is not gay, it is rather sedate, and certainly eminently respectable and dignified. Giant wheels, hurdy-gurdies, and quack photographers are banished from its beach and esplanade, and one may stroll undisturbed by anything but perambulators and bath-chairs. Its sea-front walk of a couple of miles or more is as fine as any that can be found from the Foreland to ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... catches my eye (it just came in) and something from the Lancet is extracted, a long article against quackery—and, as I say, this is the first and only sentence I read—'There is scarcely a peer of the realm who is not the patron of some quack pill or potion: and the literati too, are deeply tainted. We have heard of barbarians who threw quacks and their medicines into the sea: but here in England we have Browning, a prince of poets, touching the pitch which defiles and making Paracelsus the hero of a ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... had before been 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, and ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... he refers were clearly not members of the series he proposed to publish in the book, and perhaps they should be identified as "Sights from a Steeple," certainly, and for the other either "The New England Village" or "The Haunted Quack," both which, besides the first, were published in "The Token" for 1831, and have been ascribed to Hawthorne on internal evidence of the same sort as that on which "The Young Provincial" has ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... been brought here from London by the wife of that fat old foreigner, who is always trying to interfere with me. Mrs. Michelson, the fat old foreigner is a quack." ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... now entered, was a small, pug-nosed, chubby man, of ostentatious manners, and high pretensions to skill and knowledge in his profession; though, in fact, he was but a quack, and of that most dangerous class, too, who dip into books rather to acquire learned terms than to study principles, and who, consequently, as often as otherwise, are found "doctoring to a name," which chance has suggested, but which has little connection with ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... eat all my enemies, I should suffer from an everlasting indigestion, and, in my despair, I might fly to La Mettrie for help. It is well known that when you suffer from incurable diseases, you seek, at last, counsel of the quack." ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... 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 how ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... another for only two days. Lord Ormersfield's negative had all the exceeding politeness of offended dignity; and Louis was much amused at the surmises, with which he consoled himself, that this was nothing but some trumpery speculator, most likely a successful quack doctor—no one else went about in ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... strong, hale and healthy. A little above a fortnight ago he was seized with an inflammatory rheumatism, a common and known case, dangerous, but scarce ever remembered to be fatal. He had a strong aversion to all physicians, and lately had put himself into the hands of one Thomson, a quack, whose foundation of method could not be guessed, but by a general contradiction to all received practice. This man was the oracle of Mrs. Masham,(1197) sister, and what one ought to hope she did not think of, coheiress to Mr. Winnington-. his other sister is as mad in methodism as this in physic, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... choice; at least in her time such was the frenzy of the alleged political Millennium that Marat was soon worshipped as a martyr. This atrocious political quack, with all his daggers and his blackjacks, was likened to Jesus Christ; and among the sentiments of the hour we read, "A perfidious hand has snatched him away from his beloved people"; "To the immortal glory ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... a great deal in womanly intuition, my dear, and for my part I had the same feeling as you. I mean that that man was not just what he appeared to be, namely, a chattering, ignorant quack." ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... 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 is the ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... about New York and London in his queer stilted way. He had been a fireman on board ship, a teacher of jiujitsu, a juggler, a quack dentist, Heaven knows what else. Driven by the conscientious inquisitiveness of his race, he had endured hardships, contempt and rough treatment with the smiling patience inculcated in the Japanese people by their education. "We must chew our gall, and bide our time," they say, ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... as th' attempt on summer eve to count What dogs and beggars haunt the Pincian Mount. All Tuzzi's frauds, all Coco's falsehoods tell, And all the Beckers[1] all the rogues shall sell; How many sick some sapient quack at Rome Helps—not to England, but their longer home;[2] How many Couriers forge the scoundrel tale; How many Maids their mistress' fame assail; How many English girls, by foreign arts Seduced, have smiled ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... his suspicions. He ate and slept there, and on the following morning proceeded on his journey, and by night was within eight or ten miles of Burlington. Here he stopped at an inn kept by one Doctor Brown, "an ambulating quack-doctor" ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... allowed of the Virginian agricultural slave, and I was not ill pleased to be presented with the bright side of a condition which, to the mind of the philanthropist of every land, is sufficiently painful without the exaggerations of the political quack, or the fanatic outcry of the sectarian bigot seeking to preach a crusade of extermination against men whose slaves form their only inheritance, himself meantime, for the most selfish ends, daily planning how best to enslave the mental part of those whose credulity and weakness expose ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... '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 ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... molten gold. Every one was suffering more or less from the lassitude produced by excessive heat; the pitch was bubbling up from the seams of the deck; a strong, hot, burning smell pervaded the vessel; the chickens in the hencoops hung their heads and forgot to cackle; the ducks refused to quack, and sat with their bills open, gasping for breath; the pig lay down, as if about to yield up the ghost; and even Ungka, who generally revelled in a fine hot sun, and selected the warmest place on board, now looked out for a shady ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... Cetoxa, "the same thing has been said of the quack Cagliostro,—mere fables. I will believe them when I see this diamond turn to a wisp of hay. For the rest," he added gravely, "I consider this illustrious gentleman my friend; and a whisper against his honour and repute will in future ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... quack queer'ly quoit qui e'tus queen quo'rum quote quo ta'tion plaque piqu'ant bisque co quet'tish clique' co quet' torque ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... individual; but so far as my knowledge goes the United States stands out as preeminently the "Land of Contrasts"—the land of stark, staring, and stimulating inconsistency; at once the home of enlightenment and the happy hunting ground of the charlatan and the quack; a land in which nothing happens but the unexpected; the home of Hyperion, but no less the haunt of the satyr; always the land of promise, but not invariably the land of performance; a land which may be bounded by the aurora borealis, but which has also undeniable ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... would solemnly waddle to a certain hole in the fence well known to himself, and, by dint of much pushing with his strong, yellow feet, would squeeze himself through, and rejoin his companion with many a guttural quack and flirt of his tail. If "Chung" desired to take a bath, he would make for the brook, where "One Lung" would soon join him, always remaining, however, on the bank, where he would strut about and crow continuously. On one occasion, a chicken-hawk ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... he contributed three political squibs in verse to the Examiner, one being the 'Quack Doctor's Proclamation,' to the tune of 'A Cobbler there was,' and another called 'The fine old ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... "Quack! Quack!" called the Duck who had been sitting on her nest so long. "My first egg is cracked, and I can see the broad yellow bill of my eldest child. Ah! Now I can see his downy white head." The Drake heard her and quacked the news to every one around, and ...
— Among the Farmyard People • Clara Dillingham Pierson
... The advertising quack who wearies With tales of countless cures, His teeth, I've enacted, Shall all be extracted By terrified amateurs: The music-hall singer attends a series Of masses and fugues and "ops" By Bach, interwoven With Spohr and Beethoven, At classical Monday Pops: The billiard ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... knowledge are needed, in order to select the kind which is suitable to the particular disease, or to the particular constitution of the invalid. This shows the folly of using the many kinds of pills, and other quack medicines, where no knowledge can be had of their composition. Pills which are good for one kind of disease, might operate as poison in another state ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... unrecognised artists, mute inglorious Miltons, Chattertons, starving in garrets, Shakespeares in the workhouse, while dull modern productions are applauded on the silly English stage, and poetasters are crowned by the Academies; but believe me that in Archaeology, in the deciphering of manuscripts, the quack is detected immediately. The science has been carried to such a state of perfection that, if our knowledge is still unhappily imperfect, our materials inadequate, the public recognition of our services quite out of proportion to our labours, there is now no permanent ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... of toads has not been yet settled. That 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 stare; ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... the square, she saw a great many people collected around a carriage of eccentric shape, upon the top of which stood a man dressed in red, who was holding forth. He was a quack dentist on his rounds, who was offering to the public full sets of teeth, opiates, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... earnestly and from experience. No one has more detestation than I have for the quack that patters in the presence of trained skill; but from what I have seen and known of mission life, both in myself and others, since coming to North China, I think it is a little less than culpable homicide to deny a little hospital ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... speak of the good old days of Europe, before the cowardice of the French aristocracy (in the shameful Revolution, which served them right) brought ruin on our order.... You call a doctor an honourable man—a swindling quack, who does not believe in the nostrums which he prescribes, and takes your guinea for whispering in your ear that it's a fine morning; and yet, forsooth, a gallant man who sits him down before the baize and challenges all comers, his money against theirs, his ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... aunt Polly in the interests of his sanitarium, she was reputed the best nurse in Ada County. The widow—by desertion—of a notorious quack doctor of those parts: it was an open question whether his medicine had killed or her nursing had cured the greater number of confiding sick folk. Leander drove fifty miles to catechise this notable woman, and finding her sound on the theory ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... (little Yellow Wang-lo always called him Pa). He was a duck merchant and had hundreds of ducks—white ducks, black ducks, brown ducks, big ducks, little baby ducks, and middle-sized ducks—ducks that said quack, drakes that said quork, ...
— Little Yellow Wang-lo • M. C. Bell
... The quack is great till the true teacher comes, and then he dwindles. Simon had a bitter pill to swallow when he saw this new man stealing his audience, and doing things which he, with his sorceries, knew ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... beard was that of Van Butchell, the quack doctor, who died at London in 1814, in his 80th year. This singular individual had his first wife's body carefully embalmed and preserved in a glass case in his "study," in order that he might enjoy a handsome annuity to which he was entitled "so long as his wife remained ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... (a man of wide experience) bade him marry the worst-tempered woman he knew. Then they all gave him pills to upset his stomach; but such was its power that it assimilated them. Despairing of these, he consulted a Quack, and received the directions which brought him to Springhaven. And a lucky day for him it was, as he confessed for the rest of his life, ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... the appearance of the secretion from Cowper's glands and wholly misunderstanding its nature have feared that they were losing some vital fluid. This misunderstanding of the nature of this fluid makes the young man especially subject to the misrepresentations of the advertising quack and charlatan who allege that he is losing vital fluid and will, if not treated, undergo general debility and loss of procreative power. This brief explanation of the significance of the secretion of Cowper's glands will protect the young man from ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... ix. See also, e.g., as specimens of comical scenes, the discussions between the quack and his man in the "Play of the Sacrament": "Ye play of ye conversyon of ser Jonathas ye Jewe by myracle of ye blyssed sacrament." Master Brundyche addresses the audience as if he were in front of his booth at a fair. He will cure the diseases of all present. Be ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... all this enjoyment of empire he never once violated that respectful awe with which the usher had found means to inspire him; but he by no means preserved the same regard for the principal master, an old illiterate German quack, who had formerly practised corn-cutting among the quality, and sold cosmetic washes to the ladies, together with teeth-powders, hair-dyeing liquors, prolific elixirs, and tinctures to sweeten the breath. These nostrums, recommended ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... their seats, lasting till well into the first entree, but interspersed with remarks such as, "Tom's bad again; I can't tell what's the matter with him!" "I suppose Ann doesn't come down in the mornings?"—"What's the name of your doctor, Fanny?" "Stubbs?" "He's a quack!"—"Winifred? She's got too many children. Four, isn't it? She's as thin as a lath!"—"What d'you give for this sherry, Swithin? ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... only lads and lasses, but merry old people whirled in the dance to the music of bagpipes, clarionets and violins—examined gingerbread and other dainties with the attention of an expert, or obeyed the blasts of the trumpet, by which the quack doctor's negro summoned ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the shucks rattling upon the leaves. Or, again, after contemplating you awhile unobserved, and making up his mind that you are not dangerous, he strikes an attitude on a branch, and commences to quack and bark, with an accompanying movement of his tail. Late in the afternoon, when the same stillness reigns, the same scenes are repeated. There is a black variety, quite rare, but mating freely with the gray, from which he seems to be distinguished ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... like a mental deficient, announced that there was only one adequate explanation for Lola's conduct. This was that she was "possessed of an evil spirit" which had to be exorcised before things should get worse. Lending a ready ear to every quack in Bavaria, he sent her under escort to Weinsberg, to the clinic of a Dr. Justinus Kerner, who had established himself there as ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... against it. Roosting shags and waterfowl fly screaming away. In the swamp a bittern booms; and strange wailing cries come from the depths of the bush. On the farm dogs bark energetically, cattle bellow, horses neigh, sheep bleat, pigs grunt, ducks quack, and turkeys gobble. Frightful is the din that goes echoing among the woods. And then the outraged bridegroom gets out his gun, and commences rapid file-firing ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... 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 ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... broken through the trammels of the Faculty, and gone to the Water Cure in spite of the warnings of their medical men, and their friends' kind predictions that they would never live to come back; and hypochondriac men, who have tried all quack remedies in vain, and who have come despairingly to try one which, before trying it, they probably looked to as the most violent and perilous of all. And the change of life is total. You may have finished your bottle of port daily for twenty years, but at the Water Cure you must perforce practise ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... believe it: so should I (Like one of these penurious quack-salvers) But try experiments upon myself, Open the gates unto mine own disgrace, Lend bare-ribb'd envy opportunity To stab my reputation, and ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... these relations," says Strabo of those before his day, "it is certain that men did believe and think them true." If mankind has found the supply of all their spiritual wants within themselves, would they have clung in this way to the pretense of external revelations? Is not the abundance of quack doctors conclusive proof of the existence of disease, and of ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... story of ghastly horror which these impostors chose to tell them, they were thankful to buy at almost any price some antidote against the fell disease; and even Lady Vavasour had made many purchases for herself and her daughter of quack medicines and talismans ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... for this purpose, and the wonder is that each kind lies dormant until it is wanted. If I uncover the earth in any of my fields, ragweed and pigweed spring up; if these are destroyed, harvest grass, or quack grass, or purslane, appears. The spade or the plow that turns these under is sure to turn up some other variety, as chickweed, sheep-sorrel, or goose-foot. The soil is ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... with some spirit. "I see some o' Mis' Peak's cookin' to a farmers' supper once, when I was visitin' Susan Ellen's folks, an' I says 'Deliver me from sech pale-complected baked beans as them!' and she give a kind of a quack. She was settin' jest at my left hand, and couldn't help hearin' of me. I wouldn't have spoken if I had known, but she needn't have let on they was hers an' make everything unpleasant. 'I guess them beans taste just as well as other folks',' says she, and she wouldn't ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... 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 Man grows stronger ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... with 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
... 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, rubbing his hands. ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... cobbler, philomath, and quack, was the author of "Merlinus Liberatus," first issued in 1680. He libelled his master, John Gadbury, in his "Nebulo Anglicanus" (1693), and quarrelled with George Parker, a fellow-quack and astrologer. It is of him that Swift wrote his famous "Predictions" (see vol. i. of this edition, p. 298), ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... six or seven years old a quack phrenologist stopped at our house and Father kept him over night. In the morning he fingered the bumps of all of us to pay for his lodging and breakfast. When he came to my head I remember he grew enthusiastic. "This boy will ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... of difficult solution; and it is further embarrassed by not only the conflicting views of those entitled to some respect, but by the multifarious prescriptions intruded by a host of self-constituted experts and by all of the quack financiers of the land. Every crocheteer and pamphleteer, cocksure "there's no two ways about it," generously contributes his advice free of charge; but sound, trust-worthy advice does not roam like tramps and seldom comes uninvited. Many of the facts which surround the ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... ear-splitting, more terrific, more dizzying, or more impassable. When you go to Knype Wakes you get stuck in the midst of an enormous crowd, and you see roundabouts, swings, switchbacks, myrioramas, atrocity booths, quack dentists, shooting-galleries, cocoanut-shies, and bazaars, all around you. Every establishment is jewelled, gilded, and electrically lighted; every establishment has an orchestra, most often played by steam and conducted by a stoker; every establishment ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... to turn even virtue and wisdom themselves into ridicule, for the diversion of their master and feeder. The gentlemen of curlike disposition who were now at his house, and whom he had brought with him from London, were, an old half-pay officer, a player, a dull poet, a quack-doctor, a scraping fiddler, and a lame ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... on the atrocities and absurdities of wizards, quack doctors, and the hideous usages of native midwifery. The ministry of Christian physicians comes as a revelation to the ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... combined the popular ingredients above referred to. In March following he produced at the Haymarket, under the pseudonym of Scriblerus Secundus, The Author's Farce, with a "Puppet Show" called The Pleasures of the Town. In the Puppet Show, Henley, the Clare-Market Orator, and Samuel Johnson, the quack author of the popular Hurlothrumbo, were smartly satirised, as also was the fashionable craze for Opera and Pantomime. But the most enduring part of this odd medley is the farce which occupies ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... the thing so far that he is obliged to cheat in self-defence. And when a man tasks his wits successfully, if it be only to mislead the witless, he has a sense of satisfaction in the effort akin to that of the rhetorician and the quack. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... almost inhuman to kill the sweet little songster, particularly as it was the only creature I saw in the Arctic that uttered a pleasant note. All other sounds were such as the scream of the hawk and the gull, the quack of the duck, the yell of the wolf, the "Ooff! ooff!" of the walrus, or the bark of the seal—all harsh and unmelodious, save the tones of this sweet little singer. Nothing but starvation or scientific research could justify the slaughter of one of these innocents. I believe I ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... to a long supremacy. They have never come into power but in some perverted state of the public feelings. There must be some terror, or some infatuation, in the public mind, before it calls in the quack; but the moment that sees quiet succeed to disturbance, and the nation has recovered its composure, always sees the Whigs driven out of office. The death of Fox, in 1806, unquestionably deprived the party ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... music to wake us up for an early breakfast. I nearly laughed a rib loose watchin' them baby ducks waddle around solemn, every one with that cut-up look in his eye. Say, they're born comedians, ducks are. I'll bet if you could translate that quack-quack patter of theirs you'd get lines that would be a reg'lar scream on the ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... before, that would have removed it. Janet honestly had a certain enthusiasm for science, beneficence, and the honour of the family, but the Professor besieged Mrs. Brownlow with his entreaties and promises just as if-she said to herself-she had been the widow of some quack doctor for whose secret he ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... for Bagford is a vigorous allopath of the old school, drastic, bloody,—and an uncompromising enemy of "that quack," as he called my grave young friend. I said ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... nobody and hear nothing," she said. "All the fools be flying the place like so many silly sheep; or, if they come to sit awhile, their talk is all of pills and decoctions, refuses and ointments. Bah! they will buy the drugs of every foolish quack who goes about the streets selling plague cures, and then fly off the next day, thinking that they will be the next victim. Bah! the folly of the men! How glad I am that ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... strengthen the reason, to subdue the senses, or in what way to deal with all the varied diseases of that soul of man which we were to set ourselves to save. All its failings, infinitely more complicated than those of the body, were grouped as "sin," and for these there was one quack remedy. If the patient did not like the remedy, or got no good from it, ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... 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
... was a steady, hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazed with alcohol. His mother cooked for the miners. Her one ambition was that her son should enter a profession. He was apprenticed to a traveling quack dentist and after a fashion, learned ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... petticoat tyranny? In this matter the man distinguishes himself from the beast, seeing that no animal ever yet lost his senses through blighted love, which proves abundantly that animals have no souls. The employment of a lover is that of a mountebank, of a soldier, of a quack, of a buffoon, of a prince, of a ninny, of a king, of an idler, of a monk, of a dupe, of a blackguard, of a liar, of a braggart, of a sycophant, of a numskull, of a frivolous fool, of a blockhead, of ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... honours he transmitted to two families, wholly and entirely to his own exertions. Though he bore a name already distinguished in the annals of the English landed gentry, he had to make his own fortune under conditions of some difficulty. He was born in North America, and began life, it is said, as a quack doctor. There is also a legend of his having made a first marriage with a person of obscure birth in America. Yet such was the charm of his address, the beauty of his person, the dignity of his bearing, and the vigour of his will, that he succeeded in winning the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... rather personifying element in faith extends even to the lowest forms of it, for it is this that produces faith in pseudo-revelation, in inspiration, in miracle. There is a story of a Parisian doctor, who, when he found that a quack-healer was drawing away his clientele, removed to a quarter of the city as distant as possible from his former abode, where he was totally unknown, and here he gave himself out as a quack-healer and conducted himself as such. When he was denounced as an illegal ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... don't want to waddle like mother, Or quack like my silly old dad. I want to be utterly other, And frightfully modern ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... honest face, that thick head of hair, and that identical cap, sticking out of the top of a portable wooden frame covered with placards, setting forth the virtues of quack medicines, the excellencies of dry goods, or the unequalled attractions of concert saloons. He also remembered that this wooden frame was much taller than any of the long procession of frames which followed it, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... recommended for special study during the season: mustard (such varieties as are found in the vicinity), Canada thistle, purslane, lamb's quarter, pink-rooted pigweed, and quack grass. The pupils should be familiar with the general appearance of the plant; its appearance when coming up in the spring; whether annual, biennial, or perennial; nature of the root, and whether hard ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... little leaden image which he carried in his cap,—so the Romans under the Empire sneered at all the whole crowd of gods and goddesses whom their fathers had worshipped, but gave an implicit credence to sorcerers, astrologers, spirit-rappers, exorcists, and every species of imposter and quack. The ceremonies of religion were performed with ritualistic splendour, but all belief in religion was dead and gone. "That there are such things as ghosts and subterranean realms not even boys believe," says Juvenal, "except those who are still ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... also, much increased of late, by an accidental bias in favor of what he supposed to be natural science. Somebody had accosted him in the street, mistaking him for a no less personage than Doctor Dubble L. Dee, the lecturer upon quack physics. This set him off at a tangent; and just at the epoch of this story, my granduncle, Rumgudgeon, was accessible and pacific only upon the points which happened to chime in with the hobby he ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... complaints in one invariable routine. Hitherto things had gone well, and no one, thank Heaven, had risen up in rebellion against my prescriptions. But let a physician's cures be as extraordinary as they will, some quack or other is always ready to rip ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... 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 nor to ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... and swift like himself; in fact, like his domestic service, it was of his own invention. If he was an advertising quack, he was one who believed in his own wares. The sense of something tiny and flying was accentuated as they swept up long white curves of road in the dead but open daylight of evening. Soon the white curves came sharper and dizzier; they were upon ascending spirals, as they ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 was ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... tried to make the duck come over and carry her, but the duck said, "Quack! Quack!" and shook ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... summer parlour of the butternut's shade, he read his newspaper—a weekly Greenock print, the advertisement side half-filled with quack medicines, after the manner of such journals in Canada. Presently an entry in the 'Deaths' arrested ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... handful of thatched cottages scattered about here and there round the vicarage. Life was so regular and quiet there that you might almost tell the time without looking at the clock. When you heard cling, clang, from the blacksmith's forge, and quack, quack, from the army of ducks waddling down to the river, it was five o'clock. Ding, dong from the church-tower, and the tall figure of Mr Vallance climbing the hill to read prayers—eight o'clock. So on throughout the day until evening came, ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... 'Very true (said uncle), the one will serve to shew you your way, and the other to dazzle and confound your weak brain. Heark ye, Clinker, you are either an hypocritical knave, or a wrong-headed enthusiast; and in either case, unfit for my service. If you are a quack in sanctity and devotion, you will find it an easy matter to impose upon silly women, and others of crazed understanding, who will contribute lavishly for your support. If you are really seduced by the reveries of a disturbed imagination, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... 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 ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... none but reredosses, and our heads did neuer 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, col. 1, quoted ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... things that Mrs. Byron did on her removal to Newstead was to intrust her son to the care of a quack in Nottingham, in order to cure him of his lameness. As the doctor was not successful, the boy was removed to London with the double purpose of effecting a cure under an eminent surgeon, and of educating him according to his rank; for his education ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... a few well-educated Indian Christians living under the shadow of a well-equipped missionary hospital which furnished its medicines free, sneak away a few streets beyond to consult the man who is a compound of a quack and an astrologer. And yet, doubtless, the new pharmacy of the West brings healing in its wings to millions of this people annually; and it is one of the causes for the rapid increase ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... thousand and one quack nostrums, pomade divine, like James's powder, has obtained a reputation far above the most sanguine expectations of its concoctors. This article strictly belongs to the druggist, being sold as a remedial agent; nevertheless, what is sold is almost always vended ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... was a quack," replied Culver. "He is a natural-born healer, and he uses only nature's remedies in his practice. Go and see him, Quincy, and judge ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... relates to your welfare! You wish me to advise, to help you. Before I can do this I must have your confidence, I must know your thoughts and impulses. You can scarcely have a purpose yet. Even a quack doctor will not attempt diagnosis or prescribe his nostrum without some knowledge of the symptoms. When I last saw you in the country you certainly appeared like a conventional society girl of an attractive type, and were evidently satisfied so to remain. ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe |
