1902.

[212:1] Edward Berdoe, _The Origin and Growth of the Healing Art_.

[213:1] Charaka, _Samhita_, vol. iii, p. 8.

[214:1] Vol. ii, p. 108.

[215:1] _Social England_, vol. ii, p. 104.

[216:1] _Practitioner_, vol. lxviii; 1902.

[218:1] M. D. Synge, _A Short History of Social Life in England_.

[218:2] Dr. Theodor Puschmann, _A History of Medical Education_.

[219:1] Larousse, _Grand Dictionnaire Universel_, art. "Charlatan."

[219:2] This word appears to have been used in the sense of
_Medicaster_, a diminutive of the Latin _Medicus_, a physician.

[222:1] The spelling of this extract has been modernized.

CHAPTER XIX

QUACKS AND QUACKERY (CONTINUED)

An English physician, who practised during the early part of the reign
of King James I, described the charlatan of that period as shameless, a
mortal hater of all good men, an adept in cozening, legerdemain,
conycatching,[223:1] and all other shifts and sleights; a cracking
boaster, proud, insolent, a secret back-biter, a contentious wrangler, a
common jester and liar, a runagate wanderer, a cogging[223:2] sychophant
and covetous exactor, a wringer of his patients. In a word, a man, or
rather monster, made of a mixture of all vices.[223:3]

Robert Burton, in "The Anatomy of Melancholy," published in 1621, said
that "if we seek a physician as we ought, we may be eased of our
infirmities; such a one, I mean, as is sufficient and worthily so
called. For there be many mountebanks, quack-salvers and empiricks, in
every street almost, and in every village, that take upon them this
name, and make this noble and profitable art to be evil spoken of and
contemned by reason of these base and illiterate artificers. . . . Many
of them to get a fee, will give physick to every one that comes, without
cause."

That original genius, Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), in his "Description of a
Quack Doctor," wrote that sometimes he would employ the most vulgar
phrases imaginable, and again he would soar out of sight and traverse
the spacious realms of fustian and bombast. He was, indeed, very sparing
of his Latin and Greek, as (God knows) his stock of those commodities
was but slender. But then, for hard words and terms, which neither he,
nor you, nor I, nor anybody else could understand, he poured them out in
such abundance that you'd have sworn he had been rehearsing some of the
occult philosophy of Agrippa, or reading extracts from the Cabala.

"If a man doth but w