"Quack" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he led her to the side of a pond, where she found a duck with its head caught in a railing. She made haste to set the poor creature free, and the drake flapped his wings and gave a joyous quack of thanks. ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... And, when his medicines do no good, Supports their minds with heavenly food. At which, however well intended, He hears the clergy are offended; And grown so bold behind his back, To call him hypocrite and quack. In his own church he keeps a seat; Says grace before and after meat; And calls, without affecting airs, His household twice a day to prayers. He shuns apothecaries' shops; And hates to cram the sick with slops: He scorns to make his art a trade, Nor bribes my lady's favourite ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... cynicism of our plutocracy, its secrecy, its gambling spirit, its contempt of conscience, can doubt that the artist-advertiser will often be assisting enterprises over which he will have no moral control, and of which he could feel no moral approval. He will be working to spread quack medicines, queer investments; and will work for Marconi instead of Medici. And to this base ingenuity he will have to bend the proudest and purest of the virtues of the intellect, the power to attract his brethren, and the noble duty of praise. For that picture by Millais is ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... standing in the fields; neither was this conclusion in any way shaken when it was explained to him that the Egyptians were not in the habit of erecting corn stacks after the English model. All these classes readily lend an ear to quack, though often very well-intentioned politicians, who go about the world preaching that countries can be regenerated by shibboleths, and that the characters of nations can be changed by Acts of Parliament. This frame of ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... he gone forward? And in what way is he so superior to us already?' cried Pavel Petrovitch impatiently. 'It's that high and mighty gentleman, that nihilist, who's knocked all that into his head. I hate that doctor fellow; in my opinion, he's simply a quack; I'm convinced, for all his tadpoles, he's not got ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... here Elixir of Long Life, I might embellish it with a great many high-sounding epithets; but I disdain to follow the example of every illiterate vagabond, that, from idleness, turns quack, and advertises his nostrum in the public papers. I am neither a felonious drysalter returned from exile, an hospital stump-turner, a decayed staymaker, a bankrupt printer, or insolvent debtor, released by act of parliament. I do not pretend to administer medicines without the least tincture ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... Penhallow and Bradshaw, Attorneys at Law. Then came the standing professional card of Dr. Lemuel Hurlbut and Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut, the medical patriarch of the town and his son. Following this, hideous quack advertisements, some of them with the certificates of Honorables, Esquires, and Clergymen.—Then a cow, strayed or stolen from the subscriber.—Then the advertisement referred ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Fo-Pa (little Yellow Wang-lo always called him Pa). He was a duck merchant and had hundreds of ducks—white ducks, black ducks, brown ducks, big ducks, little baby ducks, and middle-sized ducks—ducks that said quack, drakes that said quork, and ducklings that ...
— Little Yellow Wang-lo • M. C. Bell
... counterplotting as to the disposal of the crown, the poor 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
... disinherited classes. The party of extreme measures is always chiefly constituted from the proletariat because it is the very poor who most pressingly feel the need for change and because they have not usually the education to judge the feasibility of the plans, many of them quack nostrums, presented as panaceas for all their woes. A complete break with the past and with the existing order has no terrors for them, but ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... tuberculosis on the ground that it was justified by the Bible and that it conformed to the opinions of that great mass of the American people who believe that fresh air is the devil, we should promptly lock up that doctor as a dangerous quack. When the negroes of Kansas were said to be taking pink pills to guard themselves against Halley's Comet, they were doing something which appeared to them as eminently practical and entirely reasonable. Not long ago ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... personal property, in the shape of jewelry and dresses; that they had lived upon the sale of these things for some time; and that the husband, when the wife's means were exhausted, had turned strolling-player for a year or two. Abandoning that pursuit, he had next become a quack-doctor, first in a resident, then in a vagabond capacity—taking a medical degree of his own conferring, and holding to it as a good traveling title for the rest of his life. From the selling of quack medicines he had proceeded to the adulterating of foreign wines, varied by lucrative evening ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... romance at the present moment than the fortunes of WILLIAM OF ORANGE, and if Miss MARJORIE BOWEN'S Prince and Heretic (METHUEN) shows some traces of having been rather hastily finished it is easy to pardon this defect. The alchemist's assistant, part seer and part quack, whom she introduces into the earlier part of the story foretells the violent deaths of the young princes of the house of Nassau and the ravaging and looting of the Netherlands by ALVA, Defender of the Catholic Faith and ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... has hunted ducks and been caught in a dense fog with ducks quacking all round, and who has tried to get ducks by firing at the quack in the fog, can realise the difficulty of hitting a man on the battlefield when you cannot see him, and have only a quack, or less, by which to locate him. The smoke will be generated in candles of two or three-pound cans that can ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden
... of the good old days of Europe, before the cowardice of the French aristocracy (in the shameful Revolution, which served them right) brought ruin on our order.... 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's a fine morning; and yet, forsooth, a gallant man who sits him down before the baize and challenges all comers, his money ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... 460 Of horrible eventualities Past calculation to the end of time! Can I mistake for some clear word of God (Which were my ample warrant for it all) His puff of hazy instinct, idle talk, "The State, that's I," quack-nonsense about crowns, And (when one beats the man to his last hold) A vague idea of setting things to rights, Policing people efficaciously, More to their profit, most of all to his own; 470 The whole to end that dismallest ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... is certain that men did believe and think them true." If mankind has found the supply of all their spiritual wants within themselves, would they have clung in this way to the pretense of external revelations? Is not the abundance of quack doctors conclusive proof of the existence of disease, and of the need ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... pills in foreign countries.' I laughed heartily, and explained that the British College of Health, and the College of Physicians, were not identical." We well remember a statement some years since among the innumerable puffs of the arch-quack, (now gone, we believe, to that bourn whither so many of his patients had preceded him,) that in gratitude for the countless cures of incurable diseases by the "Universal Vegetable Medicine," a statute of the Hygeist had ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... At this moment a quack was heard, and at a distance the whole tribe were seen coming waddling home, their feathers gleaming in green and gold, and they themselves ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... of Binkley & Bing I had tried to keep her before the public. As Robert James Vandiver I had hoped to withdraw her; for if ever one was made to keep company with said Vandiver and smell the salt breeze on the south shore of Long Island and listen to the ducks quack in the watches of the night, it was the Ashton set ...
— Options • O. Henry
... queen (Marie-Antoinette), their majesties asked what I thought of Mesmer's discovery. I informed them of what had taken place, earnestly expressing my indignation at the conduct of the barefaced quack. It was immediately determined to have nothing more to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... 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 ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... intellectual sinfulness and its danger to society. We see some alarming consequences in the growth of the revolt against scientific medicine. Millions of good Americans do not want to know anything about physicians who have devoted their lives to the study of medicine, but prefer any quack or humbug, any healer or mystic. Yet for a queer reason the case of the treatment of diseases shows the ruinous results of this social procedure very slowly. Every scientific physician knows that many diseases can be cured by autosuggestion ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... necessary consequence of an extended franchise. Macaulay, skilfully enough, protested against this interpretation. 'We say again and again,' he declares, 'that we are on the defensive. We do not think it necessary to prove that a quack medicine is poison. Let the vendor prove it to be sanative. We do not pretend to show that universal suffrage is an evil. Let its advocates show it to be a good.'[119] Mill rests his whole case ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... the "penguinnery," and the birds have as yet taken no notice of them. By each nest is a little mound, on which the mother stands perched, from time to time projecting her head outward and upward, at the same time giving forth a queer chattering noise, half quack, half bray, with the air of a stump orator haranguing an open-air audience. Meanwhile, the youngster stands patiently waiting below, evidently with a fore-knowledge of what is to come. Then, after a few seconds of the quacking ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... and me" were in constant communication. In that year Swift published a pamphlet called "A Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners," which anticipated many of the arguments used in the Tatler and Spectator; and he also commenced his attack on John Partridge, quack doctor and maker of astrological almanacs. On the appearance of Partridge's "Merlinus Liberatus" for 1708, Swift—borrowing a name from the signboard of a shoemaker—published "Predictions for the year 1708, wherein the month and day of the month are set ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... early there are three or four when it rains later. But we wait till the world has got dirty, and the air full of the smoke of thousands of breakfasts, and clouds are beginning to gather, and then we say England has a horrible climate. I do not believe in many quack medical prescriptions, but I have the firmest faith in May dew as a wash for the complexion. Any morning dew is nearly as efficacious if it is gathered in warm clothes, thick boots, and at ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... 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 ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... took in high dudgeon. His repugnance to the "humanities" had, also, much increased of late, by an accidental bias in favor of what he supposed to be natural science. Somebody had accosted him in the street, mistaking him for a no less personage than Doctor Dubble L. Dee, the lecturer upon quack physics. This set him off at a tangent; and just at the epoch of this story, my granduncle, Rumgudgeon, was accessible and pacific only upon the points which happened to chime in with ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... other skill she may discover being either a consequence of this knowledge, or the effects of observation and experience. The powers of a somnambule extend equally to the morale as well as to the physique. In this respect a phrenologist is a pure quack in comparison with a lady in a trance. The latter has no dependence on bumps and organs, but she looks right through you, at a glance, and pronounces ex cathedra, whether you are a rogue, or an honest man; a well-disposed, ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... all sorts of mis-begotten and degenerate breeds. I believe that the famous Mr. WEBB HALL, who was then a practising attorney in Bristol (of the firm of Jarman and Hall); I believe that this profound agricultural quack of 1821, was, in 1812, one of the formidable phalanx which was drawn ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... faces! This truth he boasts, will boast it while he lives, No poisonous drugs are mixed in what he gives. Should he succeed, you'll give him his degree; If not, within he will receive no fee! The College YOU, must his pretensions back, Pronounce him Regular, or dub him Quack. ...
— She Stoops to Conquer - or, The Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy. • Oliver Goldsmith
... could realize this idea of his, being forced to fight for himself the while; before he got it tried to any extent in the civil province of things, his head by much victory grew light, (no head can stand more than its quantity,) and he lost head, as they say, and became a selfish ambitionist and quack, and was hurled out, leaving his idea to be realized, in the civil province of things, by others! Thus was Napoleon; thus are all great men: children of the idea; or, in Ram-Dass' phraseology, furnished with fire to burn up ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... sharp lookout, he 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
... was to find Dr. Small's fine, faultless horse standing at the door. What did Henry Small want to visit this old quack for? ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... anasbleki. Quack cxarlatano. Quackery cxarlatanismo. Quadrangle kvarangulajxo. Quadrant kvadranto. Quadrate kvadrato. Quadrate kvadrata. Quadratic kvadrata. Quadrature kvadrato. Quadrille kvadrilo. Quadruped kvarpieda. Quadruple kvarobla. Quaff glutegi. Quaggy marcxa. Quagmire marcxejo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... water-fowl in the marsh; and there was something else which Mildred did not seem to like. While George was quack-quacking, and making himself as like a little goose as he could, Mildred softly called to Ailwin, and beckoned her to the hedge. Ailwin came, swinging the great spade in her right hand, as easily as ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... may further illustrate the jokes these so-called doctors play upon the common people. In a country town was a "quack" doctor, who professed to be a "head examiner," giving people charts according to their "bumps," a fad which has many followers. "This, ladies and gentlemen," said the lecturer, holding out a small skull, ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... look backward only; the conflicts in it point forward also. Its abbess is not the traditional pious, fat old lady, but a tall, thin, practical and active woman. Its Faust is a figure of aggressive naturalism, a charlatan and quack who practises blood-transfusion on the hero and who lies drunk in a pig-sty—a scene which shows Arnim's power of drastic contrast at its best. The hero, Berthold, does not sit back and wait for the crown to come to him, but with money mysteriously ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... 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 for a lad who showed any congenial ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... and the insignificant. Some of them have great historical, or economic, or intellectual value; others are as nearly worthless as it is possible for any printed matter to be. Why should you treat a pamphlet upon Pears's soap, or a quack medicine, or advertising the Columbia bicycle, with the same attention which you would naturally give to an essay on international politics by Gladstone, or a review of the Cuban question by a prominent Spaniard, or a tract on Chinese immigration by Minister Seward, or the ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... to a quack—"who promises to heal the sick, on condition that they keep from intelligent practitioners, lest his ignorance ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... have no time for the journalists, I refuse to be photographed, and I am not likely to accept the invitations. It takes my two secretaries half their time to wade through my correspondence and to decide which of it is to be pitched into the waste-paper basket. I am not a dealer in quack remedies, or an ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... you will admit that if he is not the greatest of all discoverers, he must be a dangerous quack. His process might kill you or make you insane. It ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... not interested to know that it might be measles, or it might be toothache. The patient wants to know what is the matter, and it is your business to tell it to him or he will go to a quack who will inform him ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... have not the voice of a duck. You do not speak with the quack of which they are so proud. And then, if you are truly a duck, why are ...
— Children's Classics In Dramatic Form • Augusta Stevenson
... only to other ways. A man may make a round sum at a rowing match which cripples his strength for life; or by leaping across Passaic Falls, till he breaks his neck; he may set up for a wizard or a conjuror or a quack doctor,—he may pick your pocket or fire your house,—all in the way of business. The only question is in which way will you help him on. Things must be judged of quite apart from their money-making results. The old African maker of "greegrees" ...
— Tired Church Members • Anne Warner
... spirits under him. He was supposed to diagnose the condition of the furnace by instinct, to possess some almost supernatural power of divination, like his congener in the country districts who was reputed to be able to locate an oil well or water supply by means of a hazel rod. He was a veritable quack doctor who applied whatever remedies occurred to him for the troubles of ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... exclaimed: "Ah, so now you are to have Kaffee Klatsch with the Princess. I told you so. The lady is in love with you, and the Emperor is going to offer you her hand in marriage after he has bestowed on you an Iron Cross in return for one of your quack medicines." ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... in the Materia Medica of Nature's laboratory there is a substance called "joy," which sometimes effects a cure when all else fails—or, if he did know of this medicine, he probably regarded it as a quack nostrum. ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... have nothing to do with it. Would our lady critic select a cheap sign painter to represent the beauty and glory of art, or the exhibitors of laughing gas to illustrate the science of Sir Humphrey Davy, or the performances of an illiterate quack to illustrate the dignity of the medical profession? Is our critic so profoundly ignorant of the progress of psychic science as to think such ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... affections,' retorted Mr Boffin, with ineffable contempt, 'and possess her heart! Mew says the cat, Quack-quack says the duck, Bow-wow-wow says the dog! Win her affections and possess her heart! ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... of the game wardens, or constables appointed by the government to see the game laws enforced. Joe had not felt entirely at his ease about the duck he was surreptitiously taking to town, and when, by its "quack, quack," it called upon La Chance for protection, he responded at once. Joe was obliged to liberate it then and there, and to hear the law read and expounded, and be threatened till he turned pale beside. ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... 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 is failing in his ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... electric light, has been from the ranks of the people by discovery or invention, and had to fight its way against the teaching class, from time immemorial. The circulation of the blood, which every pig-sticker knew since knives were invented, had to be forced upon medical science by a quack. And now, although the phenomena we refer to have been before the teaching class since history records anything, and although Mesmer taught it experimentally eighty years ago, science has now only got so far as to admit the existence ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... him on the right leg, about two inches from the knee. Nine days afterwards he was dead—killed, there can be little doubt, less by the wound or its effects than by the gross ignorance of his medical attendants. Three Spanish doctors, a young English surgeon, and a curandero, or quack, named Petriquillo, whom Zumalacarregui had known from his youth, and in whose skill he had great confidence, were called in. The Englishman, however, returned after two days to the squadron to which he was attached, giving as his opinion, which agreed with that of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... frolics of the crowd. The customary fooling proper to the day was going on, and no detail of it seemed to pall on the good-natured, easily amused folks who must have seen it all so often before. Much laughter was being excited by the remarks of a vender of quack medicines, who was talking with extreme volubility to a number of gayly dressed girls and fishermen. I could not distinguish his words, but I judged he was selling the "elixir of love," from his absurd amatory gestures—an ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... cook, and his remains buried with a cerement of apple sauce in the paunches of apoplectic aldermen, eating against each other at a civic feast! Such are a few hints for "Some Passages in the Life of a Green Goose," written by himself—in foolscap octavo—published by Quack and Co., Ludgate Lane, and sold by all ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... was a boy six or seven years old a quack phrenologist stopped at our house and Father kept him over night. In the morning he fingered the bumps of all of us to pay for his lodging and breakfast. When he came to my head I remember he grew enthusiastic. "This boy will be a rich man," he said. "His head beats 'em all." And he enlarged on the ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... make out some white thing, like a sea gull, moving toward us. We were running before the wind and soon were near enough to get a good view. It was a bird of some kind. We were in no doubt about the kind when it raised itself upon the water, flapped its wings and uttered a loud "Quack! qu-a-a-a-ck!" ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... he said. 'I will have no village apothecaries diagnosing my disease, no ignorant quack telling ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... The vendors of quack medicines and cosmetics are aware of the power of Greek nomenclature, and apparently subsidise scholars of some kind or other to supply them with the article. A sort of shaving soap used frequently to be advertised under a title which was as ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... 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 to embroil ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... It may be thou art fallen out with mankind, and intendest to turn quack; or as they call it in ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... two 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 Indians ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael
... "Quack-quack! Take me out! Oh, take me out!" cried poor Fluffy-dumpty. The other six ducks crowded around and looked ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... meant a doctrine as low in the intellectual scale as that of any of the objects of missionary enterprise. The conception of the transactions between God and man was apparently modelled upon the dealings of a petty tradesman. The "blood of Christ" was regarded like the panacea of a quack doctor, which will cure the sins of anybody who accepts the prescription. For anything I can say, such a creed may be elevating—relatively: elevating as slavery is said to have been elevating when it was a substitute for extermination. The hymns of the Army may be ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... United States. Whenever I see the poor, intelligent, broad-minded physician struggling along, barely able to procure for himself the necessaries required to maintain himself with proper books and appliances, while the itinerant quack or dogmatic practitioner rolls in undeserved affluence, I question the wisdom of our ethical code. Braddock, at the Monongahela, scorned to have his regulars, who had fought under Marlborough and Eugene, break ranks before a lot of breech-clouted savages, and take shelter that the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... waters now lured him into steering us to one of the side channels. We were not expected. An old mother duck was directly across our path teaching some twenty-two little black hobbling downy babies how to swim. With a cry that shrieked "Leg it—leg it" plain as a quack could speak and which sent the little fellows scuttling, half swim, half run, the old mother flung herself over on her back not a paddle's length ahead of us, dipped, dived, came up again just at our bow and flopped broken-winged over the water ahead of us near enough almost to be caught by ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... 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 which will ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... seem that they must be always either very busy for the good of others, or else extremely ill themselves. Some natural delicacy of constitution, in fact, with an unfortunate turn for medicine, especially quack medicine, had given them an early tendency at various times to various disorders. The rest of their suffering was from their own fancy, the love of distinction, and the love of the wonderful. They had charitable hearts and many amiable feelings; but a spirit of restless activity, and ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... unflattering Portrait, but even this does not disguise the contagious good humor which made men love him. When in his forty-seventh year, he fell sick of a fever, and with childish confidence turned to a quack medicine to cure himself. He died in 1774, and Johnson placed a tablet, with a sonorous Latin epitaph, in Westminster Abbey, though Goldsmith was buried elsewhere. "Let not his frailties be remembered; he was a very great man," said Johnson; and the literary world—which, like ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the atrocities and absurdities of wizards, quack doctors, and the hideous usages of native midwifery. The ministry of Christian physicians comes as a revelation ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... quack nostrums travel second-class for one cent a pound, books, engravings, manuscript copy, and works of art have to go third-class and are taxed one cent for every two ounces. They must also be left open for inspection, ...
— The Foolish Dictionary • Gideon Wurdz
... like a thin, brown shadow, Billy Mink had slipped up to the duck pond and—alas! Now Mother Quack had one less in her pretty little flock than when as jolly, round, red Mr. Sun went to bed behind the Purple Hills, she had counted her babies as they tucked their ...
— Mother West Wind's Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... know that water-fowl that cries, Quack! Quack!? Full often have I seen a waggish crew 30 Fasten the Bird of Wisdom on its back, The ivy-haunting bird, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... talked, when he did come: late in the evening generally: and then would punch his skin, and look at his tongue, and shake the bottles on the mantel-shelf with a grunt that terrified Lois into the belief that the other doctor was a quack, and her patient was totally undone. He would sit, grum enough, with his feet higher than his head, chewing an unlighted cigar, and leave them both thankful when he ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... hour later, his eyes raised to the windows of the lighted room occupied by his child, when the automobile returned. Two doctors whom he knew got out and sauntered into the house. He heard them laughing over the mistake a so-called quack had made in the case of a credulous patient, Mostyn lurked back in the shadows—he would not detain them by a useless greeting. He followed them into the house. The nurse at the foot of the stairs was beckoning them to hasten. Mostyn was again alone ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... come the advertisements of the Quack Doctors. Of the account of belles-lettres in 1754, two years after Amelia and in the actual year of Sir Charles Grandison, M. Rouquet's report is not flattering:—"The presses of England, made celebrated by so many masterpieces of wit and science, now scarcely ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... the gentleman, who had heard all this with infinite pleasure, 'I have at last met with a reasonable physician; he will not confine me to bread and water, nor starve me under pretence of curing me, like that confounded quack from whose clutches I have ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... who can argue with equal volubility on either side, but with more conviction when in the wrong. Bull must have been drunk, and drunk on stupid beer, when he placed his heart strings between the finger and thumb of a quack like that, who, whatever the result, whether we get Home Rule or not, has ruined ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... go out to walk, All the geese begin to gawk; And when I start to wander back, All the ducks begin to quack. ...
— The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes • Leroy F. Jackson
... to see him. It is easier to refuse in this way than after I have been made ill by too much feeling. I am not going to subject Charley to the mortification of taking into his circle a wife that will be always remembered as—as a sort of quack-doctor." ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... anecdote preserved by Carlyle about the little Blenheim cocker who hated the "genus acrid-quack" and formed an immediate attachment to Sir Walter. Wordsworth was far from being an acrid quack, or even a solemn prig—another genus hated of dogs—but there was something a little unsympathetic in his personality. The dalesmen liked poor Hartley ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... cured of sterility; and, from what we 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,) and Fallopio (1569,) and Ducini (1711,) who have written books, of which the object, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... from 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 Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... went pale to bed, The moon in halos hid her head: The boding shepherd heaves a sigh, For, see! a rainbow spans the sky: The walls are damp, the ditches smell, Closed is the pink-eyed pimpernel; Hark! how the chairs and tables crack; Old Betty's joints are on the rack; Loud quack the ducks, the peacocks cry, The distant hills are seeming nigh. How restless are the snorting swine,— The busy flies disturb the kine. Low o'er the grass the swallow wings; The cricket, too, how loud it sings: Puss on the hearth with velvet ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... Flam. A poor quack-salving knave, my lord; one that should have been lashed for 's lechery, but that he confessed a judgment, had an execution laid upon him, and so put the whip ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... regret to be obliged to chronicle the fact that he made and sold an alleged specific for the White Plague, thus enabling his detractors to couple with his name the word Quack. The following article, which appeared in the New York Herald of September 1st, 1859, three days after Chabert's death, gives further details of his ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... horses we speed along the bank of the Syr-darya. Here grow small woods and thickets where tigers stalk their prey, and in the dense reed beds wild boars dig up roots. The shy gazelles like the open country, hares spring over the shrubs, ducks and geese quack on the banks, and flocks of pheasants lure the traveller to sport. The setting sun sheds a gleam of fiery red over the steppe, and as it grows dim the stars begin to twinkle. The monotonous ring of ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... itinerant quack-doctor, well known to the rustic population, and absolutely unknown to anybody else, as he, indeed, took care to be, to avoid inconvenient investigations. Cottagers formed his only patients, and his Wessex-wide repute was among them alone. His position was humbler and his field more obscure than ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... investigations have continued,—continue till "May 10th, 1786," when Sentence 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 of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... to be the famous Bampfylde Moore Carew, and had most grossly imposed upon the captain and the town, but at the same time assured him that he would not injure him, but faithfully keep the secret. In the mean time there was an Irish quack-doctor in view, who had gathered the whole market around him, and who, with more strength of lungs than sense of argument, most loudly harangued, entertaining them in a very florid manner with the sovereign virtues of his pills, plasters, and self; and ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... finished than he glanced fiercely round the farmyard, and then, evidently with fell intentions, made his way towards where the rival drake was digging worms from the soft mud. His pace quickened as he approached his antagonist; then, with a loud quack, he flew at him, brought him to the ground, pecked out first one eye and then the other, and otherwise assaulted him so furiously, that his unfortunate foe sank at length lifeless beneath the blows ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston
... brief explanation may be judged the importance of the hygienic dietetic physician in cases of sickness. The quack and charlatan it is who persuade people to believe that they do not need the physician, and compel them to pay for this belief in money and in health. It is the obvious duty of every one to seek aid in case of sickness from some ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... pounds, in case he suffered Rawleigh to escape; Rawleigh solemnly assured him that he should be no loser, and that his lady should give him one thousand pounds when they got into France or Holland. About this time the French quack took his leave: the part he had to act was performed: the juggle was complete: and two wretches had triumphed over the sagacity and magnanimity of a sage and a hero, whom misfortune had levelled to folly; and who, in ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... will contribute greatly towards reduction of the diseases. For example, legislation with reference to venereal disease should require doctors to report cases to health officers, should forbid "quack" advertising of fake "cures," should forbid sale by drug stores of nostrums for personal treatment, should provide dispensaries and hospitals for reliable treatment at reasonable cost, should require medical examinations for marriage licenses and ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... it my own way," Henry said. "That same evening I learned the name of the doctor—the great specialist employed by Brooks to treat the old lady. But I inquired about him and found that he was simply a cheap quack. This was additional cause for suspicion. I called on a detective and told him that I suspected Brooks. At this he smiled. Then I said that if he would agree to give half the reward to any charity that I might name, in the event of success, I would submit my plan, and then he became ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... seized the black duck by the neck, And slung him all across his back, The black duck cried out "quack, quack, quack," With his ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... me duck too, Missie! Lard, now I don't know how I'd be without I had me duck. Duckie I calls 'er and Duckie she is; company she is, too, to me mornin's, with her 'Quack, Quack,' under the winder." ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... when the rising generation must be thoroughly instructed in this matter. That quack specific "ignorance" has been experimented with quite too long already. The true method of insuring all persons, young or old, against the abuses of any part, organ, function, or faculty of the wondrous ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... you, Iddings, and the like of you is you brood over your troubles, instead of brooding over ways to improve yourself. You spend time and money on quack doctors. But I tell you, don't fight your work or your boss. Fight nature, fight sleep, fight fatigue, fight the sky, fight despair, and if you want money hunt up a place ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... tell a lie, then," replied Pleydell, "'as she usually does. Law's like laudanum; it's much more easy to use it as a quack does, than to learn to ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... quack," said the General, "who would force himself into business by bold assertions. Doctor Tourniquet and Doctor Lancelot are men ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... read parts of Virgil and Cicero with him. Of this gentleman he always entertained a kind remembrance. Nor was his regard in this instance peculiar; for it may be said to have been a distinguishing trait in his character, to recollect with affection all who had been about him in his youth. The quack, however, was an exception; whom (from having caused him to suffer much pain, and whose pretensions, even young as he then was, he detected) he delighted to expose. On one occasion, he scribbled down on a sheet of paper, the letters of the alphabet at random, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... snort [pig, hog, swine, horse]; squeak, [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 [small birds]; hum [insects, hummingbird]; buzz [flying ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... that the wheel-hoe is much too clumsy an affair to allow of the pursuit of an individual weed. While the operator is busy adjusting his machine and manipulating it about the corners of the garden, the quack-grass has escaped over the fence or has gone to seed at the other end of the plantation. He devised an expeditious tool for each little work to be performed on the garden,—for hard ground and soft, for old weeds and young (one of his ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... din and clatter that Mrs. Gerome, who happened to get a glimpse of them, felt sorry for the poor frightened fowl, and tried to drive the little ones out of the water; but, whenever she put her hand towards them to catch the nearest, the whole brood would quack and dive,—and, when she had laughed that one short laugh, she called to me to look after them and went back to the house. You don't know how ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... minutes, and the sea is his 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 fortune against theirs, ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... and "A-quack!" said the daughter, "We've never seen objects like this in the water! Suppose we submit it to old Mrs. Ewe? She's wise about wool, and ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... Quack Matrick, a negro, fought through the Revolutionary war, as a soldier, for which he was pensioned. Also Jonathan Overtin, who was at the battle of Yorktown. The grandfather of the historian Wm. Wells Brown, Simon Lee, was also a soldier "in the ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... man, I understand, this Grimshawe,—a quack, intemperate, always in these scuffles: let him get out as ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... considered to be the great building of the town. It has been sadly eclipsed now, and by no means rears its head proudly among the great blocks around it. It had become a "Physio-medical Institute" when I was there, and was under the dominion of a quack doctor on one side, and of a college of rights of women female medical professors on the other. "I believe, sir, no man or woman ever yet made a dollar in that building; and as for rent, I don't even expect it." Such was ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... rejoined, in amazement. "What do you want with him—not medicine of that old quack, ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... many words were once more general in import than they have since become. Fond originally meant foolish, then foolishly devoted, then (becoming more general again) devoted. Nostrum meant our own, then a medicine not known by other physicians, then a quack remedy. Shamefast meant confirmed in modesty (shame); then through a confusion of fast with faced, a betrayal through the countenance of self-consciousness or guilt. Counterfeit meant a copy or a picture, then an unlawful duplication, especially ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... contemptible kind of cheating is quackery.—The quack is liar, thief, and murderer all in one. For in undertaking to do things for which he has no adequate training and skill, he pretends to be what he is not. He takes money for which he is unable to render a genuine equivalent. And by inducing people to trust their lives in his incompetent ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... a remedy much advertised at the beginning of the century by an American quack, Benjamin Charles Perkins, founder of the Perkinean Institution in London, as a "cure for all Disorders, Red Noses, Gouty Toes, Windy Bowels, Broken ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... that Mrs. Byron did on her removal to Newstead was to intrust her son to the care of a quack in Nottingham, in order to cure him of his lameness. As the doctor was not successful, the boy was removed to London with the double purpose of effecting a cure under an eminent surgeon, and of educating him according to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... coin is scarce. He vends his own secret medicines, so he keeps away from the doors of the druggists; and for this last week he has taken to sitting in my piazza for two or three hours every day, and making it a resort for asthmas and squalling bambini. It stirs my gall to see the toad-faced quack fingering the greasy quattrini, or bagging a pigeon in exchange for his pills and powders. But I'll put a few thorns in his saddle, else I'm no Florentine. Laudamus! he is coming to be shaved; that's what I've waited for. Messer ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... 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 makin' the trip in a boat, like a sensible man, but ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... with cross-bows. There, girls and boys were dancing to the sound of a pipe, or still smaller children were playing at marbles, or amusing themselves with the toys they had just purchased. Not far from these, a quack from one scaffold was descanting on the virtues of his medicines, whilst a preacher from another was holding forth to the graver part of the crowd, the joys and terrors of another life; and yet farther on, a motley groupe were listening to a blind beggar, who was singing to the music of a ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... 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 distinct echo of ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... invoice sent to London always ordered such drugs as were needed,—ipecacuanha, jalap, Venice treacle, rhubarb, diacordium, etc., as well as medicines for horses and dogs. In 1755 Washington received great benefit from one quack medicine, "Dr. James's Powders;" he once bought a quantity of another, "Godfrey's Cordial;" and at a later time Mrs. Washington tried a third, "Annatipic Pills." More unenlightened still was a treatment prescribed for Patsy Custis, when "Joshua Evans who ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... the sun at noon' — 'Very true (said uncle), the one will serve to shew you your way, and the other to dazzle and confound your weak brain. Heark ye, Clinker, you are either an hypocritical knave, or a wrong-headed enthusiast; and in either case, unfit for my service. If you are a quack in sanctity and devotion, you will find it an easy matter to impose upon silly women, and others of crazed understanding, who will contribute lavishly for your support. If you are really seduced by the reveries of a disturbed imagination, the sooner you lose your senses ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... or so for the first day, but nothing like some of our passengers. The great secret I have always found, is to eat plenty, and drink a little brandy; that is much better than all your quack receipts. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... night in New York; or that he "was pervaded, permeated, steeped, and bathed in a longing desire to behold Niagara," and that, when he beheld it, his "feelings were not so much those of astonishment as of an overpowering sense of Law"; or that a peddler in a railroad-car sold nine bottles of quack medicine at a dollar a bottle; or that he had eight pages of interview with a Baltimore madman, who proved his insanity by perpetually calling Mr. Mackay the "Prince of the Poets of England." The dreary solemnity with which these incidents are narrated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... strenuous warfare against cant. The historical 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
... caw, caw." There was no need of looking to see who that was. Peter Rabbit knew without looking. Mrs. Quack knew without looking. Just the same, both looked up. Just alighting in the top of a tall tree was Blacky the Crow. "Caw, caw, caw, caw," he repeated, looking down at Peter and Mrs. Quack and Mr. Quack and the six young Quacks. "I hope I am ...
— Blacky the Crow • Thornton W. Burgess
... "Just quack and coo and cluck as nicely as you can, and have a care to lay nice eggs. Attend very strictly to your own affairs, for I have found that one learns a great ...
— The Little Brown Hen Hears the Song of the Nightingale & The Golden Harvest • Jasmine Stone Van Dresser
... Busby, the quack-doctor up there," he answered, nodding toward a shrubbed and wooded ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... aid on my own terms, I am too generous to permit him to ruin his professional career for my sake. Such are the reasons, gentlemen of the jury and my lords, why I am now going through this trial, not secundum artum, but like an eccentric patient who won't be treated by the doctors but will quack himself. Perhaps I would be safer if I did not say a word about the legal character of the charge made against me in this indictment. There are legal matters as dangerous to handle as any drugs in the pharmacopoeia. Yet I shall trouble you for a short ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan |
