Quackery

“ All the varieties of quackery appear to be running a race, and each one pretends to be ahead of every other. Eclectics talk of nothing so much as progress. If we may believe them, all their means are the very newest of the new—they are rushing onward with the speed of a locomotive, and are outstripping and overturning all other systems. ”

“ Although quackery comprises men and things of all imaginary colors, shapes and conditions, from the coxcomb who dispenses sugar pellets, to the knavish Yankee who assumes the savage with his pretended Indian remedies, yet there are certain family traits which are common to them all. All pretend to be new and very important discoveries—all are bitterly hostile to the regular profession—all boast of their wonderful success and rapid increase, and all are only so many different views in the same great panorama passing rapidly along, never to return. ”

“ An individual in whose general integrity they have no confidence, and whose opinion or word in any other matter is not considered worth a straw, is often taken as a guide in some deeply important medical question, without any misgivings. When we look around and see what ravages quackery in its multiplied and continually multiplying forms is making among all classes, we are almost ready to conclude that this is an age of extraordinary delusion, and that quackery never ran thus rampant before ”

“ In the history of the world there are moral and social, as well as geological epochs. We live in the mercenary period, and quackery grows and flourishes now as mushrooms and ferns did in the carboniferous period. What is to be the next superabundant strata which shall swallow up the present towering stalks of moral ferns, we have no means of knowing; but let us hope that when that time does come, no out-croppings of present quackery shall remain visible. It is not my business at this time to attempt to clear off from the Indian character all the aspersions that have been cast upon it ”

“ If we search the history of quackery, we shall find that it consists of a multitude of pathies and isms—of pretended discoveries and great improvements. Each one has enjoyed its brief day of favor, and passed off to make room for others, perhaps differing in external appearance, but always of the same cryptogamian class and mushroom genus.
We often hear persons declare that they do not know what to do, or what to believe, in regard to medicine, because there are so many different courses pointed out. ”

“ Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things. ”

“ WHAT impresses one in reviewing the literature, is the extent and ancient origin of quackery, and the ineffectual fight against it. Eight pages of the 'Index Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office' are taken up with a bare list of books, pamphlets and addresses, exploiting quackery or aiming at last to deal it the long-evaded death-blow. ”

“ The most rascally of nostrum-makers often talk loudly against quackery, and very earnestly caution the public against counterfeits of their own preparations. I shall by no means undertake to expose all the tricks made use of by this class of men, for they are legions ”

“ Mead, regretting that an intelligent man, capable of advancing truth, should degrade himself to such a trade, advised him to abandon it. 'How many men a day' said the quack, 'do you think pass through this street?' 'Perhaps twenty thousand' said the doctor. ”

“ A CHIP OF THE OLD BLOCK.
⁠The youngest Bye sends out letters to his patients warning them against quackery in the cancer cure business.
⁠
frequently I heard in Indianapolis that whatever might be said of "Dr." Bye's business, he was "such a good man, and so unassuming; runs that church at his own expense." Truly it pays Uriah to be 'umble and pious.
⁠It is against the Bye principle to use the knife. Such is the inference from the advertising. "The knife, even in the hands of the most skilled operators, proves as deadly as the disease." ”

“ The ancient quacks pretended to cure their patients by the use of charms and spells, and the modern quacks pretend to cure theirs by means often equally ridiculous and equally worthless; and in each instance the intellectual and not the physical organs have been operated upon ”

“ The quack bootmaker is considerable; as corn-cutters can testify, and desperate men reduced to buckskin and list-shoes. But the quack priest, quack high-priest, the quack king! Why do not all just citizens rush, half-frantic, to stop him, as they would a conflagration? Surely a just citizen is admonished by God and his own Soul, by all silent and articulate voices of this Universe, to do what in him lies towards relief of this poor blockhead-quack, and of a world that groans under him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And Quack and Dupe, as we must ever keep in mind, are upper-side and under of the selfsame substance; convertible personages: turn up your dupe into the proper fostering element, and he himself can become a quack; there is in him the due prurient insincerity, open voracity for profit, and closed sense for truth, whereof quacks too, in all their kinds, are made.
Alas, it is not to the hero, it is to the sham-hero that, of right and necessity, the valet-world belongs. ”

“ And when we consider, on the other hand, how difficult it is to be a Quaker, how much it is against the temper and disposition of man to be singular, or to resist the tide of custom and fashion, and to undergo an ordeal of suffering on these accounts, we shall wonder that it has not been long ago extinct. ”

“ Seek only deceitful Speciosity, godlike Reality will be forever far from you. The Quack shall be legitimate inevitable King of you; no earthly machinery able to exclude the Quack. Ye shall be born thralls of the Quack, and suffer under him, till you hearts are near broken, and no French Revolution or Manchester Insurrection, or partial or universal volcanic combustions and explosions; never so many, can do more than 'change the figure of your Quack;' the essence of him remaining, for a time and times.—"How long, O Prophet?" ”

“ Unable Simulacrum of Ability, quack, in a word, must adjust himself with quack, in all manner of administration of human things;—which accordingly lie unadministered, fermenting into unmeasured masses of failure, of indigent misery: in the outward, and in the inward or spiritual, miserable millions stretch out the hand for their due supply, and it is not there. The "law of gravitation" acts; Nature's laws do none of them forget to act. The miserable millions burst forth into Sansculottism, or some other sort of madness: bricks and bricklayer lie as a fatal chaos—! ”

“ Others again may injure their health, and diminish their comfort and their utility in another way. And here I may remark, that if I have seen what the world would call superstition among the Quakers, it has been confined principally to a few females, upon whose constitution, more delicate than that of men, an attention to undistinguished impressions, brought on in a course of time by a gradual depreciation of human reason, has acted with considerable force. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is possible there may be here and mere an instance where their feelings may be unduly affected, in consequence of having carried the doctrine of the influence of the Spirit, as far as it relates to their own condition, beyond its proper bounds. But individuals, who may fell into errors of this nature, are, it is to be hoped, but few; because any melancholy, which may arise from these causes, must be the effect, not of genuine Quakerism, but of a degenerate superstition. ”

“ We ought to understand that this seeming cloud-field was once a reality; that not poetic allegory, least of all that dupery and deception was the origin of it. Men, I say, 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. ”

“ This earthquake which invisible powers heave up out of the knotty entanglement of our dark enigmatical being! which in boisterous senseless noises announces that within, in the unseen world, the soul neither recks of nor knows truth or falsehood, and has just been murdering the innocent herald who was bringing these phantasms before it! ”

“ The quakers died in their belief, and as the great always die—without a word or a tear; praying for the misguided people to their last breath, but prophecying heavy sorrow to them and to theirs—a sorrow without a name—a wo without a shape, to their whole race forever ”

“ The day after no one of us showed a sign of this outbreak. Never had I seen the like of it among us; but the Quaker habit of absolute self-repression, and of concealment of emotion again prevailed, so that at breakfast we met as usual, and, whatever we may have felt, there was no outward evidence of my mother’s just anger, of my father’s bitterness, or of my own disgust. ”

“ Men have been converted into Quakerism at the silent-meetings of Quakers; and solemn looks, dumb shew, and ghostly groans, have had all the most prevailing effects of eloquence.
Nothing is so catching and communicative as the passions. The cast of an angry or a pleasant eye will beget anger, or pleasure: One man’s anger, or sorrow, or joy, can make a whole assembly outrageous, or dejected, or merry ”

“ But in what Quakers can you see sensibility from the same cause? The dress too, of the members of this society gives them an appearance of gravity and dulness. It makes them also shy of their fellow citizens. But gravity, and dulness, and shyness, have generally, each of them, the appearance of coldness of manners.
CHAP. XV. Another trait is that of evasiveness in speech—This an appearance only, arising from a peculiar regard to truth—and from a caution about the proper use of words, induced by circumstances in the discipline, and by the peculiarities in the Quaker language. ”

“ You are not like the people you were sixteen years ago; there were few Quakers then, but they had witchcraft fits, but now of late I do not hear of any Quaker that hath any fits, no, not so much as to buz and hum before the fit comes. ”

“ The objections to the Quakerism of our day are that it is retractile, stationary, negative; it is selfish, narrow, ascetic, tame; it has no iron in its blood; it rarely adds anything to the world's thought. ”

“ I agree with the Quakers so far as they disclaim violence, and trust their cause wholly and solely to its own truth. If you are convinced of the truth of your cause, trust wholly to its truth; if you are not convinced, give it up. ”

“ If a person were to judge of the Quakers by the general gravity of their countenances, and were to take into consideration, at the same time, the circumstance, that they never partook of the amusements of the world, in which he placed a part of his own pleasures, he would be induced to conclude, that they had dull and gloomy minds, and that they could not be upon the whole a happy people. ”

“ He shook his head, for suddenly there came to him the memory of a time, three-score years before, when he and the foundryman’s daughter had gone hunting flag-flowers by the little trout stream; of the songs they sang together at the festivals, she in her sweet Quaker garb and demure Quaker beauty, he lithe, alert, and full of the joy of life and loving. As he sat so, thinking, he wondered where she was, and why he should be thinking of her now, facing the dreary sorrow of this pestilence and his own anger and vengeance. ”

“ If I quake, what matters it what I quake at? Our proper vice takes form in one or another shape, according to the sex, age, or temperament of the person, and, if we are capable of fear, will readily find terrors. ”

“ Home life, social life, business life, every modern development, is brought to the test of Quaker principles. There is a spirit abroad declaring that Quakerism has become devitalized; that the religious life is stereotyped and perfunctory; that the joyous, all-conquering zeal of the early Friends was the outcome of a secret unknown to their followers; that the way to the fount at which they were sustained is lost—that it may be found again if the daily life is brought under Divine control. ”

“ Why is Quakerism, which has lived over two hundred years, from the days of George Fox, and stood as much persecution as any system of similar age, beginning to succumb to the influences of peace and prosperity? ”

“ I grant that the Quakers are honest in their dealings, making great show of sobriety and self-denial, and abhor the practice of scandalous vices, being temperate, chaste, and grave in their behavior, and thereby they win upon unstable souls, and make plausible their damnable heresies. ”

“ The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave to the form and lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monastery and his dance; and although each prates of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spiritual. ”

“ They are founded, again, they conceive, on false principles, inasmuch as the Quakers confound causes with sub-causes, or causes with occasions. If a person, for example, were to get over a hedge, and receive a thorn in his hand, and die of the wound, this thorn would be only the occasion, and not the cause of his death. The bad state in which his body must have been, to have made this wound fatal, would have been the original cause. In like manner neither the theatre, nor the ball-room are the causes of the bad passions, that are to be found there. ”