C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Quacks
Quacks pretend to cure other men’s disorders, but fail to find a remedy for their own.
Take the humbug out of this world, and you haven’t much left to do business with.
Out, you impostors, quack-salving, cheating mountebanks! Your skill is to make sound men sick, and sick men kill.
We do not think it necessary to prove that a quack medicine is poison; let the vender prove it to be sanative.
When a man puts on a character he is a stranger to, there is as much difference between what he appears and what he is in reality as there is between a visor and a face.
Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men.
“To elevate and surprise” is the great art of quackery and puffing; to raise a lively and exaggerated image in the mind, and take it by surprise before it can recover breath.
Heroes have gone out; quacks have come in; the reign of quacks has not ended with the nineteenth century. The sceptre is held with a firmer grasp; the empire has a wider boundary. We are all the slaves of quackery in one shape or another. Indeed, one portion of our being is always playing the successful quack to the other.