Francis John Shepherd

“ If you ask a believer in some form of quackery the modus operandi of the drug or application, he tells you that there are many mysteries in nature which it is impossible to understand. If you attribute the effect to imagination, he answers that the remedy is quite as efficacious administered to young children and brute beasts, but, as Dr. Haygarth observes, "In these cases it is not the patient, but the observer, who is deceived by his own imagination."
Now, when any remedy has to be tested as being useful in a certain disease, we have, first, to be sure that the disease exists ”

“ In no country in the world are quacks more abundant than in the United States. Every city teems with faith-cure men, rubbers and strokers, clairvoyants, homoeopaths, eclectics, bone-setters, cancer-doctors, etc., etc. The advertising columns of the daily and weekly press, in the smaller towns especially, are principally filled with quack advertisements, some of them of the most disgusting and disgraceful nature, and these too in perfectly respectable sheets, which find their way without question into family circles. ”

“ It was not till after the breaking up of the powers of the priesthood by the Reformation, and the introduction of printing, that medicine began to escape from the grasp of quackery and made rapid strides toward the truth, perfecting knowledge of disease by accurate observation and the study of the human frame and its workings in health. ”

“ In every case of illness a quack administers remedies, and, of course, if the patient recovers, his recovery is attributed to the remedy; consequently the proportion of cures is large, and the number grows in the telling. In olden times, when diseases were treated by charms, fastings, prayers, and ceremonies, many of the physicians and priests, not understanding the power of nature, thought themselves favored with supernatural assistance. The quack of to-day, however, thoroughly understands what an able partner Dr. Nature is. ”

“ In about every other human subject is a small muscle going from a bony spur on the front of the haunch-bones to the muscles in the anterior wall of the abdomen. This is the rudiment of the great muscle in the kangaroo, opossum, and other marsupial animals, which supports the pouch where the immature young are carried, and the bony spur is the rudiment of a distinct bone, called the marsupial bone, which always exists in these animals, and gives attachment to the muscles which open and shut the pouch. ”

“ In man the short muscle of the foot which bends the toes is attached to the heel-bone, but occasionally the portion going to the fourth and fifth toes is separated from the portion going to the second and third toes, and is attached not to the heel-bone but to the tendon of the long flexor of the toes. In the gorilla only one slip of this short flexor arises from the long flexor of the toes, but in apes we have as a normal condition the arrangement I have endeavored to describe as that occasionally seen in man. ”

“ I fear not as long as human nature exists in its present condition. Still, no doubt, there is a probability of the number of believers in quackery being diminished by a greater diffusion of philosophical habits of thought and a more general knowledge of physiology. ”

“ It has become quite the 'mode' to visit the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, and witness the sensational cures performed publicly on the victims of hystero-epilepsy. This notoriety is both pleasing to the patients and the public. If a nervous disease is treated by unusual methods, it becomes common; hysterical subjects having always a morbid desire to make themselves remarkable, and so be the center of attraction, it pleases their vanity and self-love. ”

“ Lord Bolingbroke died from the effects of a quack cancer-remedy; and I could enumerate many more men of equal talents who were similiarly affected with this mental obliquity.
Probably the greatest supporters of quacks and quackeries, next to the fair sex, are ministers of religion; hardly an advertisement of a quack-remedy can be read without coming across testimonials from them. They are generally the first to support any new form of charlatanism. In the country parts, especially, while administering to diseased souls they love to essay the efficacies of new cure-alls on diseased bodies. ”

“ The only way it is possible to explain the evidence of Browne and Wiseman is that they were ardent royalists, and held the efficacy of the royal touch to be as much a party tenet as the divine right of kings, and that by doing so they pleased the court and so advanced their own interests. Had they doubted it, they would have incurred the suspicion of being disaffected to the government. [4] Failures of cure were attributed, as in our own day, to want of faith, as one writer puts it, "none ever failed of receiving benefit unless their little faith and credulity starved their merits." ”

“ Men of education are the very ones who have been, and are now, duped by clever quacks. A man may be an able politician, distinguished in literature, of great shrewdness in the ordinary business of life, and yet believe in spiritualism, homœopathy, Perkinism, and tar-water. ”

“ Among the Israelites the priests had charge of the health of the people, and in time of plague and pestilence relied wholly on religious methods of cure. According to the accounts that have come down to us, these methods were most successful. In highly civilized Greece, priests, the direct descendants of Æsculapius, cured disease by mysterious ceremonies, music, offerings, fastings, and such like. In Rome, when a plague broke out, the priests endeavored to combat it by feasting the gods, or driving nails into the right wall of the Temple of Jupiter. ”

“ JOHNSON defines a quack as "a boastful pretender to an art he does not understand," and perhaps the term is more often applied to boastful pretenders of the art of medicine than of any other. [1] Probably, ever since man acquired the faculty of articulate language, quacks and quackeries have flourished. In the ruder ages, man attributed all disease to the influence of evil spirits, and sought by various means to ward off or lessen their injurious and malevolent actions. ”

“ Another muscle which I have seen in about three per cent of human subjects is a small one which goes from the breastbone to the upper end of the shoulder-blade. This muscle is well developed in animals which have no collar-bones; it reaches its highest development in the horse, pig, hippopotamus, and elephant. It is also seen in the Guinea-pig, Norway rat, and wombat. It is quite rudimentary when it exists in man, and serves no useful purpose.
In man, near the elbow-joint, and lying close together, are two muscles going from the upper to the lower arm ”

“ On referring to the anatomy of the lower animals, it is found that both these varieties exist normally, but in a much more highly developed state; they are especially well seen in animals which use their fore-limbs for digging, climbing, or swimming. In them the muscle is of large size, and reaches to the inner edge of the lower extremity of the arm-bone; in man, when it reaches thus far, it is only rudimentary and of no use. ”

“ By our knowledge of this most intricate subject the significance of many variations and rudimentary organs is made plain.
It has been well said that "the development of the individual is the compressed development of the race in the process of compression; some features are suppressed or modified, and others are thrown into relief." In the development of the embryo we see the history of the race, but the higher the form the more quickly does the embryo pass through those stages and transformations which are the equivalent of what is persistent in types below. ”

“ On one occasion, as he was cantering round the park, he saw a man strike a woman, and, without an instant's hesitation, he pulled up, leaped from his horse, seized the fellow bodily, and flung him over the park-rails. ”

“ Many hysterical cases were possibly benefited purely by the effect of the imagination: as the disases are ones of the imagination, so are the cures. We have yet to hear of a case of actual disease, such as is daily seen in our hospitals, cured by this method. ”

“ Many variations are explained when an appeal is made to comparative anatomy, a science which is as yet very incomplete, but which is rapidly enlarging its boundaries. Some animals we know by their fossil remains, and in these merely their bony structure can be studied; all the soft parts are, of course, lost forever, and can only be approximately restored by our knowledge of allied existing types of the same animals. ”

“ When he is ill he will probably, after taking in vain the various much vaunted and advertised panaceas, call in some quack who promises a cure in a certain time and in some uncommon manner.
Bishop Berkeley is an example of a man of great attainments, whose mind was obscured by quackery. His tar-water he considered an infallible remedy for all ailments, and wrote a book describing its universal efficacy in curing disease. ”

“ One more example from the osseous system, and I shall pass to the softer structures. In the human wrist are eight small bones called carpals, and arranged in two rows; occasionally between the two rows we have a ninth bone called the os centrale. This os centrale is always present in the higher apes and some of the rodents. We also find that in every human fœtus at an early period a rudiment of this bone exists, but it has entirely disappeared by the fourth month of fetal life. ”

“ Wallace, in his book on "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," holds that the theory of a future existence as taught by spiritualists is the "only one yet given to the world that can at all commend itself to the modern philosophical mind," and in the spiritual world the law of "progression of the fittest" takes the place of the grand law of the "survival of the fittest" in the material world. ”

“ Another kind of quack is one who does not charge for advice, but when a patient consults him he terrifies him into believing he has some serious disease which only his medicine can cure. This is a very old form of quackery. ”

“ One asserts, as a scientific fact, that all diseases originate in disorders of the nervous system, and urges every one, before it is too late, to come and drink of his nervine tonic. Another states that physicians now admit that all diseases are due to impure blood, and vaunts the efficacy of his magnetic blood-purifier. Then comes a vile woodcut of the inventor, with a list of the testimonials of the most laudatory character, showing how this more than human doctor had snatched the writer from the jaws of death, and perhaps something worse ”

“ That the emancipation of medicine from superstition did not immediately take place is evidenced by the wonderful hold the belief in the cure of scrofula by the royal touch had on the people, both medical and lay, for many years after the Reformation, nay, almost down to our own time. ”

“ Now, as an eminent physiologist has lately said, the controlling of unknown powers has always been a matter of some difficulty, and one which ordinary mortals with average ability could not successfully attempt; hence arose a class of specialists—men who, by their greater knowledge and cleverness, made others believe that they were able to cope with the unseen. These were the priests, and, without doubt, the first quacks. ”

“ Religious newspapers are no exceptions to the rule; in them the advertisements have a religious gloss to attract the holy. Perhaps texts are quoted, or the advertiser poses as a philanthropist or clergyman, and treats the poor gratis; at the same time he hints that the only reason he is so generous is that he enjoys the luxury of doing good to suffering humanity. ”

“ In early times, when great prejudice existed against the dissection of human bodies, and animals, such as monkeys, dogs, cats, etc., were frequently used as substitutes, the similarity of some of their muscles to those which occasionally occurred in man as anomalies, forced the anatomists to remark on them as being curious coincidences, though in their published works they drew no conclusions from their occurrence bearing on the origin of man. ”

“ I could multiply, ad infinitum the variations in human anatomy which have their corresponding normal condition in the lower animals, but I think I have described a sufficient number of examples to show how common these animal resemblances are in man. ”

“ The ointment was prepared in various ways, and its ingredients were most diverse, consisting of human fat and blood, mummy, moss from a dead man's skull, bull's blood and fat, etc. At one time there was a schism in the weapon-salve school, and a serious and acrimonious discussion arose as to "whether it was necessary that the moss should grow absolutely on the skull of a thief who had hung on the gallows, and whether the ointment, while compounding, was to be stirred with a murderer's knife." ”

“ EVER since the study of human anatomy has attracted any attention, variations in the arrangement of the different structures of the body have been noticed. For many centuries, the signification of these variations was not understood ”

“ The symptoms for which metals are applied can not be ascertained without calling the patient's attention to their existence; the strange and unusual remedy of application of a string of coins can not be adopted without exciting expectation of a local result—an expectation which it has been often demonstrated is sufficient to determine the disappearance of local symptoms in this remarkable disease. ”