Charlatan

“ It is not that this percentage is wicked, nor is it strikingly good, neither is it necessarily feeble-minded, but it shows itself so entirely unimaginative and inane that it is no wonder that the charlatan in religion, politics, and education rampages over the world through a perfect maelstrom of bouquets. Nothing impersonal ever seems to stir the sluggishness of their "souls." They feel nothing that does not hit them straight between the eyes. They never perceive the tragedy behind the smile, the wrong behind the justice of the law, the piteousness and helplessness of men and women. ”

“ The trickster and the charlatan, who in medicine and even in the pulpit find it easy to dupe their fellow-men, find at the bar that all attempts to make shallowness pass for depth, impudence for wit, and fatal for wisdom, are instantly baffled. ”

“ The sagacious charlatan is aware of this state of things, and seizes every opportunity to gain the favor of all the gossips in town, and to enlist them in his service. Officious individuals may sometimes pay all their own medical bills in this way, and perhaps get some presents to boot. ”

“ The fools, in this pleasant world, are such a respectable and wealthy minority, that the charlatan will not cease from among us, until the last of mortals shall have put on immortality: and then, like the fellow, who entered Charon’s boat, with his commodities, he will try to smuggle some of his patent medicines, or leetil doshes, into the other world. ”

“ In fact, there is no other department of spiritism to which the taint of fraud has so thoroughly attached itself. It is obvious that any clever charlatan, by persuading his sitters that darkness is necessary for the development of occult phenomena, can produce most mystifying effects, and the records of scientific investigations, to say nothing of the records of our police courts, abound in evidence that swindlers have not been slow in availing themselves of this opportunity to prey on the credulous and superstitious. ”

“ Hundreds of thousands of impostors, idle, licentious, and impudent, who are hated and despised even by those who think they need their religious aid. And all this abomination is carefully hidden under a close veil of tinsel and finery, and foolish, empty ceremonies, in all ages the charlatan’s conditio sine quâ non. ”

“ With no more, however, than a moderate allowance, for man’s notorious diathesis towards lying, for pleasure or profit, it is truly wonderful, that credulity should preserve its relative level, as it does, and ever has done, since the world began. Many, who will not go an inch with the Almighty, without a sign, will deliver their noses, for safe keeping, into the hands of a charlatan, and be led by him, blindfold, to the charnel-house. ”

“ After he has been denounced as charlatan, as false prophet and deceiver, for advancing the truths we have been considering—does it mean nothing to you to find that the truths which he stood for are permeating the philosophies of men and are receiving the sanction and approval of the learned? ”

“ The hope that to the last lurks in the breast of the veriest wretch under heaven's canopy, whether his trials come from broken health, or an empty pocket, or wronged affection, speaks aloud in saddest tones, as one thinks of the multitudes who, worn with bodily malady and spiritual dejection, ignorant of the source of their sufferings, but thirsting for relief from them, have gone from charlatan to charlatan, giving hoarded money in exchange for charms, cramp-rings, warming-stones, elixirs, and trochees, warranted to cure every ill that flesh is heir to. ”

“ Once the synonym of all that was honorable and reverent, of a possessor of learning and wisdom, it has become degraded into an epithet to designate one who is a pretender and a juggler; a charlatan, in short, or one who has “sold his soul to the Evil One;” who misuses his knowledge, and employs it for low and dangerous uses, according to the teachings of the clergy, and a mass of superstitious fools who believe the magician a sorcerer and an enchanter. ”

“ One naturally hesitates about giving any measure of credit to a physician whose professional conduct, as revealed in his relations to Mauriceau’s patient, is clearly that of a charlatan. At the same time we are obliged to bear in mind that in 1670 it was still possible for a physician or surgeon to own a secret method of treatment and yet not forfeit all consideration on the part of his professional brethren. ”

“ A charlatan, who had slyly watched him for some time, now stepped up to him, and before long drew from the unsophisticated mountaineer a detailed account of his long cherished hopes and of his present bitter disappointment.34 After listening with feigned sympathy to the whole story, the charlatan suggested that if the peasant’s means would not permit his buying a foal, he ought to purchase a mare’s egg; adding that a cow could hatch it, and suckle the foal until it was old enough to eat grass. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The ignorant charlatan, unable to write his own advertisements, has recourse to some professed expert, whose well-disciplined imagination is ever ready to conjure up such pompous falsehoods as are best calculated to gull the public. ”

“ After all that has been said of the exertions of the charlatan to abuse the confidence of mankind, particularly as far as dyspepsia is concerned, it is due to the medical profession, to state what claims they may fairly advance, to entitle them to the good opinion of the public, in the cure of this much talked of affection. ”

“ Probably at no period in the world's history has charlatanry been more flourishing than during the first decade of the twentieth century, and that too in the face of unexampled progress in medical Science. ”

“ The charlatan takes very different shapes according to circumstances; but at bottom he is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always selfish and material. ”

“ I had heard it spoken of by old men in my childhood as the name borne by a dazzling charlatan, who had made a great sensation in London for a year or so, and had fled the country on the charge of a double murder within his own house—that of his mistress and his rival. I said nothing of this to Mr J——, to whom reluctantly I resigned the miniature. ”

“ And as many, who are incapable of being real orators, study most faithfully the tricks of oratory, and so far succeed as to deceive the superficial and the ignorant, so there is many a physician, who, instead of bestowing all his energies upon the management of disease, wastes them in learning the tricks of the charlatan, which will enable him, like the mock orator, to make a show of skill and acquire the reputation of possessing it with the multitude. ”

“ As long as general readers can be kept from the habit of registering at every step the fact of their own ignorance and the limits if their own knowledge, a clever charlatan can deceive them about anything he pleases:—"from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter" ”

“ CLIV.—CHARLATANRY OF THE PRIESTS.
What would we say of a crowd of quacks, who every day would exhibit in a public place, selling their remedies and recommending them as infallible, while we should find them afflicted with the same infirmities which they pretend to cure? Would we have much confidence in the recipes of these charlatans, who would bawl out: "Take our remedies, their effects are infallible—they cure everybody except us?" What would we think to see these same charlatans pass their lives in complaining that their remedies never produce any effect upon the patients who take them? ”

“ So long as this biological law exists, so long the charlatan will keep his hold on the ignorant public. So long as it exists, the wisest practitioner will be liable to deceive himself about the effect of what he calls and loves to think are his remedies. ”

“ This will, of course, be perceived at once by a capable master, who will be only too careful in such cases to leave well enough alone. A charlatan or impostor, on the other hand, can work irremediable harm by interfering with such voices and attempting to modify or improve them. ”

“ There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling. ”

“ Such, however, is the natural outcropping of an ignorant teaching and vulgar prejudice that feeds and clothes the charlatan and ascribes to savage and uncultured races an occult familiarity with pathological, physiological, and remedial effect unattainable by the most advanced sciences ”

“ But those acquainted with the charlatanry in these days of what is called ‘Christian Science,’ and know the extent to which crass ignorance and predisposed credulity can be duped by childish delusions, may have some ‘idea how acute was the spirit-rapping epidemic some forty or fifty years ago. ‘At this moment,’ writes Froude, in ‘Fraser’s Magazine,’ 1863, ‘we are beset with reports of conversations with spirits, of tables miraculously lifted, of hands projecting out of the world of shadows into this mortal life. ”

“ In another place, all manner of odd superstitions and quasi-miracles are cropping up and gaining credence, as if, since the immortality of the soul cannot be proved by logic, it should be smuggled into belief by fraud and violence—that is, by the testimony of the bodily senses themselves. Taking a comprehensive view of the whole field, therefore, it seems to be divided between discreet and supercilious skepticism on one side, and, on the other, the clamorous jugglery of charlatanism. ”

“ The charlatans, whether they deal in moral or in physical wonders, form a race which is never extinct. They migrate to the different zones of the social system, and though they change their place, and their purposes, and their victims, yet their character and motives remain the same. ”

“ It is not a very serious offense, and you and I have no great interest in the case, but of course the public has got to be protected from charlatans, and the only way to do it is to brand as guilty those who pretend they are duly licensed to practise medicine when they are not. ”

“ Mental quackery rests on the same platform as all other quackery. The chief plank in this platform is the Mental charlatanism doctrine that Science has two principles in partnership, one good and the other evil, — one spiritual, the other material, — and that these two may be simultaneously at work on the sick. ”

“ When once the victim is within the web, flattering, intimidations, and extravagant promises, one or all, generally will accomplish their aim. As they never expect to see a special victim again, they squeeze the last dollar from the unfortunate wretch, giving therefor nothing—worse than nothing! I sent a pretended patient to one of these charlatans not long since, and, with crocodile tears in his eyes, he related his [Pg 182] case to the soi-disant doctor, who with great sympathy heard his case, and assured him it was “heart-rending, and, though very dangerous, he could cure him;” ”

“ It is here that some degree of charlatanism comes into play, for the operating medicine-man will presently produce a tangible object from his mouth, a bit of stick, a thorn, a fishbone, or anything of a similar description, and inform the patient and his friends that this is the material form which had been assumed by the evil spirit which he has drawn bodily from the flesh of the sick person. ”

“ With the hocus-pocus of common charlatans they have carried their wares to market, and as candidates and teachers of philosophy generally spring up from the same effort, there resulted an alliance of charlatans whose object it was on the one side to raise themselves to heaven, and on the other to suppress all true thinking, so that the public might be prevented, by a just consideration of their own worthlessness. ”

“ Add to those things all the knavery and artifice which the charlatans put in practice to deceive and delude the people, and then can we be surprised that they succeeded in imposing on them and gaining their belief? But let it not be imagined, nevertheless, that everyone was their dupe, and that amongst so many blind and credulous people there were not always to be found some men sensible and clear-sighted enough to perceive the truth. ”

“ They have exposed the fraudulent pretensions of innumerable charlatans, and have thus acted as a protection for the credulous. They have shown that, making all possible allowance for error of whatever kind, there still remains in the phenomena of apparitions, clairvoyance, etc., a residuum not explainable on the hypothesis of fraud or chance coincidence. ”

“ The vile practices, the monstrous impudence, the cruel rapacity and enormous gains of the obscene tribe of quacks, together with the mischief they do, and the ruin they work, would require much more space to adequately ventilate than we can devote to it here. The healing art is a noble one, and duly qualified men, interested in their profession, are public benefactors; but the despicable race of charlatans not only rob their victims, but frequently ruin their health, and drive them to the verge of insanity. ”