A variety of remedies have from time to time been advertised by quacks.

Quacks again, according to their boldness and way of addressing (velvet and infallibility particularly) command success by striking the fancies of an audience.

To the astrologers of the 17th century, the quacks and impostors of the beginning of the 19th are only equal.

In the reign of James I, a terrible sweep was made among the quacks and advertising gentry.

The council dispatched a warrant to the magistrates of the city of London, to take up all reputed quacks, and bring them before the censors of the college, to examine how properly qualified they were to be trusted, either with the limbs or lives of his majesty's lieges.

The country, even in this age of progressing wisdom, is deluged with quack medicines, which credulous people say are not directed against the constitution, but only against the pocket, and that they are too insipid to do either good or harm; but were this the case, there would have been no occasion for the exemplary punishments with which it is recorded quacks of all sorts have at various times been visited.

Amulets, talismans, charms, and incantations, are innocent and innoxious, and may impose only on credulity without any other untoward consequence, leaving the patient in the same state in which he was found; but so much cannot be said for quacks and quack-medicines which frequently remove their deluded victims far beyond the reach of either physic or philosophy.

Van Helmont had several other famous nostrums, with which he pretended to perform wonders, as quacks have done in all ages, and as some do now: for empiricism was never more in fashion than at the present day, and the chemical art has supplied them with many more arcana and nostrums than the ancients had in all their antidotes and theriacas, etc.

Whether this taste is to be considered as a proof of the weakness of our judgment, or of innate inquisitiveness, which stimulates us to enlarge the sphere of our knowledge, must be left to the decision of metaphysicians; it is sufficient for our present purpose to know that it gave rise to a numerous class of impostors in the shape of quacks, mountebanks, poison-swallowers, fire-eaters, and pill-mongers.

The people who make a business of this lying, and profiting by it, are called quacks.

The Fatimites indeed sprang from the same movement, and their founder professed the same political and irreligious philosophy as Hasan himself; but this did not stand in his way, and his knowledge of their origin made him the less disposed to render homage to the sacred pretensions of the new imams, whom he contemptuously designated as the spawn of the quacks, charlatans, and the enemies of Islam.

They were not pretenders and quacks; they were sceptics who denied subjective truths, and labored for outward advantage.

Hippocrates, when he ridiculed the quacks of his day, and collected the facts and phenomena of disease, and inferred from them the proper treatment of it, was as much the father of induction as Bacon himself.

He regarded the remedies proposed by the Revolutionary quacks as worse than the disease which they professed to cure.

The projects of Don Custodio were as renowned as quacks' specifics.

This lays him open to all cheats, quacks, and impostors, who apply to every particular humour while it lasts, and afterwards vanish.

My dear father must forgive me for reflecting so harshly on his brother practitioners, and be reconciled when he hears that they belong to the corps of quacks; for they doubt their own powers, and are constantly imposing on the credulity of others.

It is the same and our enemies are the same old insolent quacks and impostors, who wish to make a footstool of the profession on which to stand and show themselves to the public....

Hence Pulpits rail; grave Senates learn to jar; Quacks scold; and Billinsgate infects the Bar.

SEE Markun, Leo. Quacks and quackeries of the healing cults.

Haldeman-Julius Co. (PWH); 2Apr54; R127981. Quacks and quackeries of the healing cults.

The American lark never mounts higher than the top of a meadow elm, on which it see-saws, and screams, or quacks, till it is tired; then draws a bee-line for another tree, or a fence-post, never even undulating on the voyage.

And, methinks, it would be an acceptable Service to take them out of the Hands of Quacks and Pretenders, and to prevent their imposing upon themselves, by discovering to them the true Secret and Art of improving Beauty.

Doctors are quacks.

If not of smoke at least of flaming lies, And florid vaunts of quacks who advertise.