"Quack" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... old-fashioned dew beladen flowers, the perfume of which fills the morning air. Her spirits rise as she wanders on, drinking in with delight the surrounding beauty, so absorbed is she in it that she forgets there is such a person as Jimmy Dalrymple. Quack, quack, quack, go the ducks as she approaches the lake on which they disport themselves, and gazes down at the sky therein reflected and at her own image. But she is not admiring her youthful face and the curly golden hair that stands like a halo round it. No, ...
— Lippa • Beatrice Egerton
... and business, bustle and conceit; With looks unaltered by these scenes of woe, With speed that, entering, speaks his haste to go, He bids the gazing throng around him fly, And carries fate and physic in his eye: A potent quack, long versed in human ills, Who first insults the victim whom he kills; Whose murderous hand a drowsy Bench protect, And whose most tender mercy is neglect. Paid by the parish for attendance here, He wears contempt upon his sapient sneer; In haste he seeks the bed where Misery lies, Impatience ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... their mother, but in a hurried pop-and-go-one fashion, in and out, and round and round, and seeming to go through country dances on the water in chase of water beetles and running spiders or flies, while the duck kept on uttering a warning quack, and the drake, who, first with one eye and then with the other, kept a sharp look up in the sky for falcons and hawks, now and then muttered ...
— Young Robin Hood • G. Manville Fenn
... acknowledged favourite at court: a thoroughly successful man indeed. Then we come down to the year 1789, and find the artist of the Eidophusikon assuming a new character. He has become a physician—a seer—a fanatic—and, it must be said, a quack; a disciple of Mesmer, a friend of Cagliostro; practising animal magnetism, professing to cure all diseases, and indulging ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... by some circuitous route. They never can learn that nature shows you the weakest point, and that you should assist her,—that hit him straight in the eye is as good a maxim in draining as in pugilism. * * * * * * If you wish to drain, we recommend you to take advice. We have disposed of the quack, but there is a faculty, not numerous but extending, and whose extension appears to us to be indispensable to the satisfactory progress of improvements by draining,—a faculty of draining engineers. If we wanted a profession ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... very gay. An opera was given at the theatre, after which the ladies of the place took the air, walking up and down with their gentlemen. Drolls, marionettes, quack-doctors, a strolling company of comedians from Venice, tumblers and jugglers were holding their performances before great assemblies of the meaner sort; but the gentry kept the middle of the square, and there too Virginia and I, in our finery, braved it with the best. ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... ammoniated tinc. of quack 1/2 oz., honey 1/2 oz., camphor water 6 oz., mix and cork. Take two tablespoonsful three or four times a day in chronic rheumatism; rub well the affected ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... was that of Van Butchell, the quack doctor, who died at London in 1814, in his 80th year. This singular individual had his first wife's body carefully embalmed and preserved in a glass case in his "study," in order that he might enjoy a handsome annuity to which he was entitled "so long ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... characterize this latest Minerva-birth. For it is either that "new sensation" demanded by the Sir Charles Coldstream who has used up all religions and all philosophies, or, being a reductio ad absurdum of speculative pretension, it fulfils the promise of a recent quack advertisement, and is in very truth "The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... matter of that, you might exclaim at the quack doctor of a fair, and ask, Is this the dignity of medicine?' said Joe. 'There's a head and a tail to every walk in life: even the law has a Chief-Justice at one end and a Jack Ketch at ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... dissociable. Then somebody tells him it's the duckin' season down to Setuckit P'int, and he says he'll spend his day off, while the boss is away, massycreein' the coots there. This same somebody whispers that I know so much about ducks that I quack when I talk, and he comes cruisin' over in the buzz-cart to hire me for guide. And—would you b'lieve it?—it turns out that he's cal'latin' to make his duckin' v'yage in that very cart. I was for ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... men, the same in kind, but of different origins. When told by the comparative philologists that this was impossible, because the languages spoken through that wide region, demonstrated that its inhabitants must have had a common descent, he could only answer that as ducks quack everywhere, he could not see why men should not everywhere speak ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... the trees, and everything was very quiet, that a long, slim fox stole softly beneath the fence and came creeping—creeping across the barn yard. Mamma Goose was so frightened that she almost said "Quack! quack!" out loud, but still she kept her eyes on the big white cock, and that was ...
— The Wise Mamma Goose • Charlotte B. Herr
... 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. Let us try if, leaving out both the quack theory and the allegory one, and listening with affectionate attention to that far-off confused rumour of the Pagan ages, we cannot ascertain so much as this at least, That there was a kind of fact at the heart of them; that they too were not mendacious and distracted, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... her own fashion in the middle of the lake. Presently what Lionel had feared came to pass, and with a bump which sent us both off our feet, the yacht was driven straight on to the duck, which gave a terrific "Quack!" and swam ...
— The Mysterious Shin Shira • George Edward Farrow
... Taylor the quack calls himself Chevalier 'Tis not easy a reason to render, Unless blinding eyes that he thinks to make clear Demonstrates ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... think it particularly brilliant to remark, with a knowing wink, at sight of an innocent cow at pasture, "The simple cow knows her way to the hay!" Nor do I regard it as evidence of notable mental gifts to answer the greeting of the inoffensive duck, "The quack shoots off his mouth!" No, the extravagances of that Blackbird, who makes me bristle, no more constitute wit than his ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... 8:29). He also uses the description, Son of Man, with its suggestions from the past. He forgives sins. He speaks throughout the Gospels as one apart, as one distinct from us, closely as he is identified with us—and all this from a son of fact, who is not insane, who is not a quack, whose eyes are wide open for the real; whose instinct for the ultimate truth is so keen; who lives face to face with God. What does it mean? This, for one thing, that most of us have not given attention enough to this matter. I have confined ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... climbed the hills, scaled the old castle walls, and dived into curious tumbledown streets. The keeper of the newspaper-shop confessed to me his own peculiar grievance, namely, that he often sent money to England in reply to quack advertisements, but never had any reply. He seemed to be too "poli" to credit my assertion that there are "many rogues in perfidious Albion," and on the whole he was scarcely shaken in the determination to persevere in filling ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... Of all other sorts of men I declare myself tired. They're tedious failures. When I was on earth, professors of all sorts prowled round me feeling for an unhealthy spot in me on which they could fasten. The doctors of medicine bade me consider what I must do to save my body, and offered me quack cures for imaginary diseases. I replied that I was not a hypochondriac; so they called me Ignoramus and went their way. The doctors of divinity bade me consider what I must do to save my soul; but I was not a spiritual hypochondriac any more than a bodily one, and would not trouble myself ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... for not sooner warning a family of the fact that, in some case he and it are anxiously watching, death is inevitable. As to this the doctor has very mingled feelings. Sometimes he lacks courage, sometimes he is not sure enough to speak. A weak man fears that he will lose his patient and some quack be called in, and thus lessen the little chance yet left. Most of us can recall painful interviews in which a relative insisted on a definite opinion, which we were unable to give. As to cases where there is little or no doubt left, perfect frankness should be, and is, I think, our rule, ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... and go abroad. My intention was to avoid cities, and, wandering from village to village, lay my soul bare to the healing influences of nature. As to any healing in the power of Time, I despised the old bald-pate as a quack who performed his seeming cures at the expense of the whole body. The better cures attributed to him are not his at all, but produced by the operative causes whose servant he is. A thousand holy balms require ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... been said to the disadvantage of the devil, that he has very much improved in his management of worldly affairs; so much so, that, instead of an administration of witches, wizzards, magicians, diviners, astrologers, quack doctors, pettifogging lawyers, and boroughmongers, he has selected some of the wisest men as well as greatest fools of the day to carry his plans into effect. His satanic majesty seems also to have considerably improved in his taste; owing, no doubt, to the present improving state of society, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... bird, with his whole wisdom of man packed up small for ready use, like a quack doctor," he said, as soon as they were ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... difficulty," said Arthur, "for the doctors are not of equal authority. Mrs. Pratt is a quack, but Solomon is a professional—a regular, natural, artistic, and scientific cook, which at sea is the same ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille
... bull-neck, a biceps worthy of Michel Angelo, who resembled equally a Marseillais hair-dresser and the Hercules at a country fair, a masseur, pedicurist, manicurist and something of a dentist, rested both elbows on the table with the assurance of a quack whom one receives in the morning and who knows the petty weaknesses, the private miseries of the house in which he happens to be. M. Bompain completed that procession of subalterns, all classified with reference to some one specialty. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... boy-king lay there almost neglected, or watched only by those who waited the moment of his death with impatience. As the disease took deeper and fatal hold of him, all forsook him save an incompetent quack nurse; and how far she may have helped on the end ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... those allegorical representations where the vanquished offer the keys of their cities to the conquerors. Although Rudolph believed himself sufficiently changed by years not to be recognized by Polidori, he yet pulled up the collar of his coat before passing the door of the quack Bradamanti. ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... University was based on the gleaming granite and stainless steel building dedicated to research in agronomy which bore the legend "Johnson Foundation" over the entrance. No one hearing him pronounce "magic formula" putting into the word all the contempt of the scientist for the quack, could ever put credence in the base slander. "What was this 'magic formula' you caused to be put on the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... the impositions practiced by an itinerant quack was made in a series of three confession articles, in Sunday issues of the Kansas City Star, written by a young man whom the doctor had employed to drive him through ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... remedies is almost endless, and many of them hold alcohol in some form; but every intelligent physician knows that 90 per cent. of these alleged remedies have little or no intrinsic value. The nostrums of the quack, the bitters, elixirs, cordials, extracts, etc. nearly all contain alcohol, and this is the ingredient which aids their sale. The whole unclean list might, with advantage to mankind, ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... think, to imitate the work of nature. His inexhaustible patience stood him in good stead in all these practical details. Rivals might speak contemptuously of the 'carbolic treatment' and the 'putty method' as if he were the vender of a new quack medicine; but at the back of these details was a scientific principle, firmly grasped by one man, while all others ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... classes; who, as if poverty were not a sufficient misery in itself, are ever ready to embitter it by litigation. These, like quacks in medicine, excite the malady to profit by the cure, and retard the cure to augment the fees. As the quack exhausts the constitution the pettifogger exhausts the purse; and as he who has once been under the hands of a quack is for ever after prone to dabble in drugs, and poison himself with infallible prescriptions, so the client of the pettifogger is ever after prone ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... at last, organic disease—and that my days were numbered. I tried the water cure, homoeopathy, allopathy— everything. Some day, I must recount my consultations, on the same Sunday, with Sir James Clarke, Her Majesty's physician, and Dr. Quin, homoeopathist, jester, and, as some said, quack." ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... I," Morris said: "but you've got to remember that there's a whole lot of those doctors on the case, Abe—some of them quack doctors, too, and, when the doctors disagree, who is ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass
... son of King Charles VII, must hear this sort of thing from a quack doctor! I have always liked people of low rank; Olivier the barber ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... the finest collections of old almanacs is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford—chiefly seventeenth-century productions. A still older almanac was the "Poor Robin" of 1664; another seventeenth-century almanac being the "Vox Stellarum" of Francis Moore, a quack doctor. In 1733 Benjamin Franklin published in Philadelphia his "Poor Richard's Almanac," noted for its verses, jests, and sayings. The monopoly once possessed by the Stationers' Company has long been broken down, and of later almanacs and calendars there is no end. ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... was given.] M. Target", Advocate of the enchanted Cardinal, "is coming out with his MEMOIR: he does his function; and God knows what are the lies he will produce upon us. There is a MEMOIR by that Quack of a Cagliostro, too: these are at this moment the theme ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... do) to any story of ghastly horror which these impostors chose to tell them, they were thankful to buy at almost any price some antidote against the fell disease; and even Lady Vavasour had made many purchases for herself and her daughter of quack medicines ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the shadowy flood, Save rare sharp stridence (that means "quack"), Low amber light in Ariel track Athwart the dun (that means ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... that any stray bullet would come near him. But he could not see any one. He could hear the wild-fowl crying in the Park ... distinctly, in the pause of the firing, he could hear a duck's quack-quack.... ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... of these had helped keep the town wrought up against Doctor West. Moreover, Katherine despised Bruce as a powerful, ruthless, demagogic hypocrite. And to her hostility against him in her father's behalf and to her contempt for his quack radicalism, was added the bitter implacability of the woman who feels herself scorned. The town's attitude toward her she resented. But Bruce she hated, and him she prayed with all her soul that she ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... have seen, we think there are far more unpromising places. Doctors, whose names only are known, but who were probably men of learning, have written on these salutary springs, and modern flippancy has at present forborne them. We have no Quack to patronize them; the "numen aquae" is not violated in print at least by jobbing apothecaries; but there is Gentile di Foligno, and Ugolino di Monte Catino, and Savonarola, and Bandinelli (1483,) ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... patients describe the Water Cure! This is, at all events, a different strain from that of people who have been victimized by ordinary quacks and quack medicines, and who bestow their imprecations on the credulity which has at once ruined their constitutions and emptied ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... been intentional?" asked Cora further. She had in mind the "quack" doctor so long sent to Salveys' by the Roland ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose
... the allurements of error would dazzle our eyes. The greatest obstacles to be overcome are not material ones, but moral difficulties. As Franklin says, in substance, he that tells you you can succeed, in any way but by labor and economy, is a quack. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... ambiguous politician, or an actor charged with a part, have but one pre- occupation; they must search all round and upon every side, and grope for some central conception which is to explain and justify the most extreme details; until that is found, the politician is an enigma, or perhaps a quack, and the part a tissue of fustian sentiment and big words; but once that is found, all enters into a plan, a human nature appears, the politician or the stage-king is understood from point to point, from end to end. This is a degree of trouble ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... loud quack; it was the first time he had felt any pain, and at the sound his mother ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... required less thought, and took up more room than others. What shews the facilities afforded by this style of imposing generalization, is, that it was instantly adopted with success by all those who were writers by profession, or who were not; and that at present, we cannot see a lottery puff or a quack advertisement pasted against a wall, that is not perfectly Johnsonian in style. Formerly, the learned had the privilege of translating their notions into Latin; and a great privilege it was, as it confined the reputation and emoluments ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... I had adopted this healing resolution, I reached the spot where the almost perpendicular face of a steep hill seems to terminate the valley, or at least divides it into two dells, each serving as a cradle to its own mountain-stream, the Gruff-quack, namely, and the shallower, but more noisy, Gusedub, on the left hand, which, at their union, form the Gander, properly so called. Each of these little valleys has a walk winding up to its recesses, rendered more easy by the labours of the poor ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... shine like molten gold. Every one was suffering more or less from the lassitude produced by excessive heat; the pitch was bubbling up from the seams of the deck; a strong, hot, burning smell pervaded the vessel; the chickens in the hencoops hung their heads and forgot to cackle; the ducks refused to quack, and sat with their bills open, gasping for breath; the pig lay down, as if about to yield up the ghost; and even Ungka, who generally revelled in a fine hot sun, and selected the warmest place on board, now looked out for a shady spot, and sat with his paws ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... said, withdrawing his gaze from the sunset and bestowing it gravely upon her. "As a physician. Do you size him up as capable or as something of a quack?" ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... "Quack! Quack!" called the Duck who had been sitting on her nest so long. "My first egg is cracked, and I can see the broad yellow bill of my eldest child. Ah! Now I can see his downy white head." The Drake heard her and quacked the news to every one around, and flapped his wings, ...
— Among the Farmyard People • Clara Dillingham Pierson
... of the medical profession was composed of men who devoted themselves to fighting the public welfare for life! We have that kind of doctors—but we call them quacks. We don't allow 'em in our medical societies. We punish them by ostracism. But the quack lawyers who devote themselves to skinning the public—they are at the head of the bar. They are made judges. They are promoted to supreme courts. A damn nice howdy-do we're coming to when the quacks run a whole profession. And Tom Van Dorn is a quack—a hair-splitting, ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... altered voice; "that thought is an insult. And even now, who knows if she really loves? does she know herself? She is enamored of genius, of the soul and intellect of that seller of verses, that literary quack; but she will study him, we shall all study him; and I know how to make the man's real character peep out from under that turtle-shell of fine manners,—we'll soon see the petty little head of his ambition and his vanity!" cried Butscha, rubbing his ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... green-table. You call the profession of the law an honourable one, where a man will lie for any bidder;—lie down poverty for the sake of a fee from wealth; lie down right because wrong is in his brief. You call a doctor an honourable man,—a swindling quack who does not believe in the nostrums which he prescribes, and takes your guinea for whispering in your ear that it is a fine morning. And yet, forsooth, a gallant man, who sits him down before the baize and challenges all comers, his money against theirs, his ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... Belinda, "depend with more security upon the honour of a surgeon who is at the head of his profession, and who has a high reputation at stake, than upon a vague promise of secrecy from some obscure quack, who has no reputation ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... to think over plans for seeing a doctor. He had heard somewhere a story about a young fellow who had fallen into the hands of a quack, and been ruined forever. So he decided that he would consult ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... "Some impudent quack," said the General, "who would force himself into business by bold assertions. Doctor Tourniquet and Doctor Lancelot are men of ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... that a predilection for Birmingham, is entertained by every denomination of visitants, from Edward Duke of York, who saw us in 1765, down to the presuming quack, who, griped with necessity, boldly discharges his filth from the stage. A paviour, of the name of Obrien, assured me in 1750, that he only meant to sleep one night in Birmingham, in his way from ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... grassy slopes, the Tsomass ends. When they approached the river mouth, they saw extending from the bank a salmon trap, and even to-day, the Indians will show at Lup-se-kup-se some old rotten sticks, which they affirm formed part of that same trap. The land was green, the wild duck's quack was heard among the reeds which edged the river bank, while flocks of geese were feeding on the grass which grows thickly upon the tidal flats, the flats the ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael
... duck With spots on his back, Who lived in the water, And always said "Quack!" Dear ...
— Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading - Selected from English and American Literature • Horace Elisha Scudder, editor
... take the field to cure a fashionable ailment. I know a quack doctor who has built himself a house with nothing but mercury, as the motto ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... and stupefying tendencies which, by a private process known to the assigns of the inventor, have been so masked or removed that it possesses in many cases an availableness which the practitioner can not despise, though compelled by the secrecy of its formula to rank it among quack medicines. The amount of it which my friend had taken during his month's eclipse represents an ounce of dry gum opium—in rough measurement a piece as large as a French billiard ball. I thus particularize because he had never previously been addicted to the drug; had inherited ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... Drunken Dutchman resident in England A Phantastique: An Improvident Young Gallant A Button-Maker of Amsterdam A Distaster of the Time A Mere Fellow of a House A Mere Pettifogger An Ingrosser of Corn A Devilish Usurer A Waterman A Reverend Judge A Virtuous Widow An Ordinary Widow A Quack-Salver A Canting Rogue A French Cook A Sexton A Jesuit An Excellent Actor A Franklin A Rhymer A Covetous Man The Proud Man A Prison A Prisoner A Creditor A Sergeant His Yeoman A Common Cruel ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... York and London in his queer stilted way. He had been a fireman on board ship, a teacher of jiujitsu, a juggler, a quack dentist, Heaven knows what else. Driven by the conscientious inquisitiveness of his race, he had endured hardships, contempt and rough treatment with the smiling patience inculcated in the Japanese people ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... of the two sermons[120] to the bookseller Colburn for L250—well sold, I think—and is to go forth immediately. The man is a puffing quack; but though I would rather the thing had not gone there, and far rather that it had gone nowhere, yet, hang it! if it makes the poor lad easy, what needs I fret about it? After all, there would be little gain in doing a kind ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... th' attempt on summer eve to count What dogs and beggars haunt the Pincian Mount. All Tuzzi's frauds, all Coco's falsehoods tell, And all the Beckers[1] all the rogues shall sell; How many sick some sapient quack at Rome Helps—not to England, but their longer home;[2] How many Couriers forge the scoundrel tale; How many Maids their mistress' fame assail; How many English girls, by foreign arts Seduced, have smiled on needy 'Knaves of Hearts!' Or left our church, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... schoolmaster; "that is, more appropriately concatenated with your own trade than wid mine. I have no trade, sirra, but a profession, and neither have you. You stand in the same degraded ratio to a tradesman that a rascally quack ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... It may be thou art fallen out with mankind, and intendest to turn quack; or as they call it ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... expected to present himself at Browndown at a moment's notice. To being the last person informed (instead of the first) of Mr. Nugent Dubourg's exaggerated and absurd view of the case of his afflicted child. To the German surgeon, as being certainly a foreigner and a stranger, and possibly a quack. To the slur implied on British Surgery by bringing the foreigner to Dimchurch. To the expense involved in the same proceeding. Finally to the whole scope and object of Mr. Nugent Dubourg's proposal, which had for its origin rebellion against the decrees of ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... now entered, was a small, pug-nosed, chubby man, of ostentatious manners, and high pretensions to skill and knowledge in his profession; though, in fact, he was but a quack, and of that most dangerous class, too, who dip into books rather to acquire learned terms than to study principles, and who, consequently, as often as otherwise, are found "doctoring to a name," which chance has ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... dislodge him. This said, he withdraws by himself to a little Tent made on purpose, where he dances, and sings houling like an Owl; (which gives the Jesuits Occasion to say, That the Devil converses with 'em.) After he has made an end of this Quack Jargon, he comes and rubs the Patient in some part of his Body, and pulling some little Bones out of his Mouth, acquaints the Patient, That these very Bones came out of his Body; that he ought to pluck up a good heart, in regard that ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... In some parts of Syria, as in Arabia, almost every ill and affection is attributed to the rheums, or called so. Rheumatism, for instance, is explained by the Arab quack as a defluxion of rheums, failing to discharge through the upper orifices, progress downward, and settling in the muscles and joints, produce the affection. And might there not be more truth in that than the diagnosis of him who is a Membre ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Scene 3, is from Fletcher's Captain, Act iv, the scene in Lelia's chamber. Again, the procedure and orations of Lopus the mountebank are but the flimsiest alterations of Volpone, Act ii, Scene I, nor could Killigrew change Jonson for anything but the worse. He has even gone so far as to name his quack's spouse Celia, a ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... Fred growled, buttoning his overcoat with a shiver. "What a way to sing a part for the first time! That duck really is on my conscience. It will be a wonder if she can do anything but quack! Scrambling on in the middle of a performance like this, with no rehearsal! The stuff she has to sing in there is a ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... facts with which he had to deal he grouped under these embracing categories, and in the French Revolution, which is as much a treasure-house of his philosophy as a history, there is hardly a page on which they do not appear. "Quack-ridden," he says, "in that one ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... strengthen the reason, to subdue the senses, or in what way to deal with all the varied diseases of that soul of man which we were to set ourselves to save. All its failings, infinitely more complicated than those of the body, were grouped as "sin," and for these there was one quack remedy. If the patient did not like the remedy, or got no good from it, the ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... still alive, Nature not dead or like to die; that all true men continued true to this hour,—Odin himself true, and the Grand Lama of Thibet himself not wholly a lie. The Lecture on Mahomet ("the Hero as Prophet") astonished my worthy friends beyond measure. It seems then this Mahomet was not a quack? Not a bit of him! That he is a better Christian, with his "bastard Christianity," than the most of us shovel-hatted? I guess than almost any of you!—Not so much as Oliver Cromwell ("the Hero as King") would I allow to have been a Quack. All quacks I asserted to be and to have been ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Merton, smiling. He felt rather as if he were being treated like a quack doctor, to whom people (if foolish enough) appeal only as the last ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... three political squibs in verse to the Examiner, one being the 'Quack Doctor's Proclamation,' to the tune of 'A Cobbler there was,' and another called 'The ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... A quack had brought a remedy which would cure gangrene, he said. The sore on the leg was hopeless, but they gave the king a dose of the elixir in a glass of Alicante. "To life and to death," said he as he took the glass; "just as it shall please God." The remedy appeared to act; the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... your special pleading, and fraught with national prejudice, to defend, like the philosopher Grassi,[593] the persecutor of Galileo, principles {263} and reasoning which, unless you are actually insane, or an ignorant quack in mathematics, you know are mathematically false. What a moral lesson this for the students of the University of London from its head! Man! demonstrate corollary 3, in this note, by the lying dogma of Newton, or turn your thoughts ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Cowper's glands and wholly misunderstanding its nature have feared that they were losing some vital fluid. This misunderstanding of the nature of this fluid makes the young man especially subject to the misrepresentations of the advertising quack and charlatan who allege that he is losing vital fluid and will, if not treated, undergo general debility and loss of procreative power. This brief explanation of the significance of the secretion of Cowper's glands will protect the young ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... kind that hasn't feathers and doesn't say quack," replied Mally from below. "No, darling, you're not a goose; you're Mally's good boy. Now, ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... introduced, they not only afford the Apiarian no assistance against the inroads of the bee-moth, but they are so constructed as positively to aid it in its nefarious designs. The more they are used, the worse the poor bees are off: just as the more a man uses the lying nostrums of the brazen-faced quack, the further he finds himself from ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... was, that he had taken a peculiar fancy to a quack medicine, called Enouy's Universal Medicine for all Mankind; and Mr Pottyfar was convinced in his own mind that the label was no libel, except from the greatness of its truth. In his opinion, it cured everything, and he spent one of his quarterly bills every year ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... to the Hansen plums—all seem to be doing well and are set full of fruit. We would also mention the Hansen sweet alfalfa, which is a wonder. It grows and spreads equal to quack-grass. Four years ago we received fifty plants, which were planted according to directions of the professor to set two feet apart and cultivate the first year. During these four years it does not appear that there has been ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... to acquire applause, Try various arts to get a doubtful cause; Or, as a dancing master in a jigg, With various steps instructs the dancing prig; Or as a doctor writes you different bills; Or as a quack prescribes you different pills; Or as a fiddler plays more tunes than one; Or as a baker bakes more bread than brown; Or as a tumbler tumbles up and down; So does our author, rummaging his brain, By various methods try to entertain; Brings a strange groupe of characters before you, ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... Wilton and I were at his bedside, I saw on the table a 'quack' pamphlet on the 'dew' treatment for nervousness, the benefit of the 'wet, cooling grass' upon the feet at night. You know the kind of ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... the 'Courier' and read three or four advertisements of quack medicines, but nobody entered. It was nearly midnight: he got nervous. Somebody came in; Lord Hounslow for his rubber. Even his favoured child, Bagshot, would be better than nobody. The Duke protested that ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... if not to make profits?" retorted Sir Tiglath. "Every one is a company nowadays. Don't you know that? Murchison, the famous writer of novels, is a company. Jeremy, the actor-manager, is a company. So is Bynion the quack doctor, and the Rev. Mr. Kinnimer who supplies tracts to the upper classes, and Upton the artist, whose pictures make tours like Sarah Bernhardt, and Watkins, whose philosophy sells more than Tupper's, and Caroline Jingo, ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... Busby, the quack-doctor up there," he answered, nodding towards a shrubbed and wooded hillock ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... by and by detected something moving among the water grasses a little way ahead, and heard a hoarse, squalling "Quack! quack!" ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... motor was small and swift like himself; in fact, like his domestic service, it was of his own invention. If he was an advertising quack, he was one who believed in his own wares. The sense of something tiny and flying was accentuated as they swept up long white curves of road in the dead but open daylight of evening. Soon the white curves came sharper and dizzier; they were upon ascending spirals, as they say ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... from stall to stall, laughing, gesticulating, and bargaining, and evidently enjoying themselves. A pretty girl was trying ear-rings, and looking at the effect in a mirror held by the vendor, while older folks flocked round a quack medicine dealer, who was loudly proclaiming the virtues ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... for the visitor to be an alarmist, for there are imaginary invalids among the poor as well as elsewhere, but more frequently the poor neglect the earlier symptoms of sickness altogether, or else dose themselves with patent medicines. The quack doctors who advertise in the daily papers draw much of their custom from the very poor, who are also large consumers of cure-alls and proprietary medicines. We have seen how children's physical defects can pass unnoticed at home, and this is the case in a less degree with the defects and ailments ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... [swine, mouse]; neigh, whinny [horse]; bray [donkey, mule, hinny, ass]; mew, mewl [kitten]; meow [cat]; purr [cat]; caterwaul, pule [cats]; baa^, bleat [lamb]; low, moo [cow, cattle]; troat^, croak, peep [frog]; coo [dove, pigeon]; gobble [turkeys]; quack [duck]; honk, gaggle, guggle [goose]; crow, caw, squawk, screech, [crow]; cackle, cluck, clack [hen, rooster, poultry]; chuck, chuckle; hoot, hoo [owl]; chirp, cheep, chirrup, twitter, cuckoo, warble, trill, tweet, pipe, whistle ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... recalling what the Prince told me for a fact just before I went abroad. He had been informed of it by a social worker who gave him chapter and verse. Two years ago the medical profession published a book exposing all the fraudulent patents and quack medicines which occupy so large a space in the advertising columns of our newspapers. The book was put authoritatively upon the market, and, as I understand, was advertised in all the leading papers. When the paid-for advertisements terminated not a single ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... only must the teacher know where the pupil is failing, but also the cause of his failure. Only when we know this can we intelligently apply the remedy for the failure. A physician friend of mine tells me that almost any quack can prescribe successfully for sickness if he has an expert at hand to diagnose the case and tell him what is the matter. This is the hardest part of a physician's work and requires the most skill. So it is with the teacher's work as well. If we are sure that a certain boy ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... herbalist. With poppy-flowers I prepared an elixir which cleared the sight; with borage I obtained a syrup which was a sovran remedy for whooping-cough; I distilled camomile; I extracted the essential oil from the wintergreen. In short, botany had won for me the reputation of a quack doctor. After ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... fall and pities us, gladdens in our virtue, and shall not leave us till we die; an ideal self, who is our judgment? and if it be yet answered that this in truth is so, and might be borne but for the errors of the idealizing temperament, shall we not reply that the quack does not discredit the art of medicine, nor the demagogue the art of politics, and no more does the fool in all his ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... inappreciation of him on the part of the public arose chiefly from the two causes to which I have referred—from the facts that he is neither a man of wealth nor a quack; but these are insufficient to account for the whole effect. No small portion of it is attributable to the very marked idiosyncrasy of Mr. Hawthorne himself. In one sense, and in great measure, to be peculiar is to be original, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... seventeenth centuries the sheet format lent itself largely and conveniently to teachers, quack doctors, astrologers, announcing their addresses, qualifications, and terms, no less than to the official, municipal, or parochial authorities, and to private persons who desired to give publicity to some current matter by the exhibition of the placard ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... nearly all crimes, vices, cruelties, and other evil acts are due to ignorance or to mental disease. I do not hate the man who calls me an infidel, a liar, a blasphemer, or a quack. I know that he is ignorant, or foolish, or ill-bred, or vicious, and ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... tipplers grew pale and visibly thinner; nature made her exactions with unwonted abruptness. A certain degree of sympathy was felt for the Bacchanals, by none more sincerely than by the druggist—artful old quack! It was to him the sufferers had to turn, to such straits were they reduced. Drugs were booming, and the druggist, not satisfied with the normal hugeness of his profits, slipped into the fashion and fleeced all round with unprecedented ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... the same way, where a rank growth of weeds is found springing up upon land that has been abandoned, it may be taken for certain that the elements of food exist in the soil. This ground was covered with vegetation, but of the most impoverished description, even the "Quack" or "Couch-grass" could not form a regular carpet, but grew in small, detached bunches; everything, in fact, bore evidence ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... consumption, in mankind, that at length all political phenomena find their solution. As long as we fail to follow their effects to this point, and look only at immediate effects, which act but upon individual men or classes of men as producers, we know nothing more of political economy than the quack does of medicine, when instead of following the effects of a prescription in its action upon the whole system, he satisfies himself with knowing how it affects the palate and ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... force,' shall be used. We shall then come to the ultima ratio, after all compromises have been tried. There may be an inevitable conflict. The permanent principles of nature and society, which are beyond all laws, will decide the issue. But Manning's is a mere quack remedy. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... intruders; but no one heeded his look. At a signal from the Dominican a servant had brought in a pair of candelabra, and in their commonplace light the cabalistic hangings, the magician's appliances and his fantastically-dressed attendants looked as tawdry as the paraphernalia of a village quack. Heiligenstern alone survived the test. Erect, at bay as it were, his black robe falling in hieratic folds, the white wand raised in his hands, he might have personified the Prince of Darkness drawn up undaunted against the hosts of the Lord. Some one had snatched the little prince from his stretcher, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... monk— (What vineyards have those priests!) And Gobbo to quack-salver sunk, To leech vile murrained beasts; And lazy Andre, blown off shore, Was picked up by the Turk, And in some harem, you be sure, Is forced at ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... through underground stems or rhizomes like quack-grass, Johnsongrass, bittersweet, and the like are ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... though even now I cannot make things fall into sentences—they only sprawl over the paper in bald orphan clauses. Then I was about in the afternoon with Baxter; and we had a good deal of fun, first rhyming on the names of all the shops we passed, and afterwards buying needles and quack drugs from open-air vendors, and taking much pleasure in their inexhaustible eloquence. Every now and then as we went, Arthur's Seat showed its head at the end of a street. Now, to-day the blue sky and the sunshine were both entirely wintry; and there ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would not listen. His eyes sparkled with indignation. "Sir Arthur," he said, "I have so often warned you against that rascally quack, that I wonder ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... depend. Law and physic are jist the same, and every mite and morsel as bad. If a lawyer takes to cantin', it's like the fox preachin' to the geese, he'll eat up his whole congregation; and if a doctor takes to it, he's a quack as sure as rates. The Lord have massy on you, for he won't. I'd sooner trust my chance with a naked hook any time, than one that's half covered with bad bait. The fish will sometimes swaller the one, without thinkin', but they get frightened at t'other, ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... not Dr. Quack, was it?' I asked; 'because, poor fellow, he came to an untimely end the other night,—had his head bitten off, and his body was then dragged across the yard, as I ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... Empire sneered at all the whole crowd of gods and goddesses whom their fathers had worshipped, but gave an implicit credence to sorcerers, astrologers, spirit-rappers, exorcists, and every species of imposter and quack. The ceremonies of religion were performed with ritualistic splendour, but all belief in religion was dead and gone. "That there are such things as ghosts and subterranean realms not even boys believe," says Juvenal, "except those who are still too young to pay a farthing for a bath." ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... superstition gave the coup de grace, Great Allison, the statesman-chap affirms 'Twas lack of coins (croaks Medico: "'T was worms") And John P. Jones the swift suggestion collars, Averring the no coins were silver dollars. Thus, through the ages, each presuming quack Turns the poor corpse upon its rotten back, Holds a new "autopsy" and finds that death Resulted partly from the want of breath, But chiefly from some visitation sad That points his argument or serves his fad. They're all in error—never human mind The ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... his eyes sparkling with indignation. "Sir Arthur, I have so often warned you of the knavery of that rascally quack, that I really wonder you should quote him ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... up, and with the edge of the rubber towards the front. When once wet, it will adhere to the roof of the mouth, and by skilful blowing, it can be made to send forth a most surprising variety of sounds. The quack of the duck and the song of the thrush may be made to follow each other in a single breath, and the squeal of a pig or the neigh of a horse are equally within its scope. In short, there is scarcely any animal, whether bird or quadruped, ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... carried a suggestion of the Middle Ages, A was no quack. He was, I think, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and had undergone a certain amount of medical training. He saved many a life, perhaps mine included, for he pulled me through my bout of fever. But several of his serious operations went wrong. This may have been due to lack of proper ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... may be any agent—medicinal, alimentary, or poisonous—which unduly stimulates the kidneys; the reckless administration of diuretics, which form such a common constituent of quack horse powders; acrid diuretic plants in grass or hay; new oats still imperfectly cured; an excess of roots or other very watery feed; a full allowance of salt to animals that have become inordinately fond of it; but, above all, feeding on hay, grain, or bran which has not ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... conversation; so of a writer, who delivers himself up to you perforce unreservedly, you say, Is he honest? Does he tell the truth in the main? Does he seem actuated by a desire to find out and speak it? Is he a quack, who shams sentiment, or mouths for effect? Does he seek popularity by claptraps or other arts? I can no more ignore good fortune than any other chance which has befallen me. I have found many thousands more readers than I ever looked for. I have no right to ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... have always found a powerful anti-splenetic; and, although I am not a professed physician, I will venture to prescribe to you in this instance with all the confidence of Hippocrates. The whole system of nostrums from that arch-quack, the old serpent, down to the far-famed Stoughton of our own day, does not present so powerful a remedy, amid all its antis, as cheerful reading to a heavy spirit. I will venture to say, in the spirit of Montesquieu, that an hour of such reading will place one quietly ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... trace: for the scores are older than we ourselves, and there has never yet been a settling-day since things were. You get entertainment pretty much in proportion as you give. As long as we were a sort of odd wanderers, to be stared at and followed like a quack doctor or a caravan, we had no want of amusement in return; but as soon as we sank into commonplace ourselves, all whom we met were similarly disenchanted. And here is one reason of a dozen, why the world is ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... clerical authorities of Catholic and Protestant lands, the anatomists and physiologists had at last obtained permission to dissect bodies and to substitute a positive knowledge of our organs and their habits for the guesswork of the mediaeval quack. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... slave becomes useless to his master in the interior, or exhibits signs of failing constitution, he is soon disposed of to a peddler or broker. These men call to their aid a quack, familiar with drugs, who, for a small compensation, undertakes to refit an impaired body for the temptation of green-horns. Sometimes the cheat is successfully effected; but experienced slavers detect it readily by the yellow eye, swollen ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer |
