Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/904

822 quarters of the world. We can find examples of them as far back in the world's history as we have a mind to go; but the typical quacks date from the end of the sixteenth century. Beginning with this period, reputations have been established the remembrance of which has been sent down to us. Charlatans have also had their times of trouble, but the species has been preserved and perpetuated from generation to generation, from century to century, and still flourishes. Quacks still invest themselves with embroidered cloaks, wigs, and indescribable hats, or something like them, and with the help of the most astonishing blandness sell their wares, which are warranted to cure all diseases. It is not easy to learn to gain the ear of the throng, but some persons are marvelously skillful at it. Some quacks engage exclusively in special lines of practice, while others will offer a balm sovereign against all diseases. I recollect that when I was a child one Zozo passed regularly from one village to another at the time of the rural festivals, selling a vermifuge, the praises of which he sounded in a speech whose eloquent persuasiveness I have never heard excelled. The tradition is preserved also in Paris of Dr. Napolitano, who used to make his perorations in 1815, dressed in a magnificent scarlet cloak trimmed with gimp and gilt; of Duchesne, who inclosed himself in a sack and pulled a tooth with one hand and fired a pistol with the other; of Lartaud, chiropodist to the Emperor of Morocco, etc.

The type of the plumed charlatan, such as is represented in Gerard Dow's picture in the Munich Museum and Du Jardin's in the Louvre, is declining, and is now met less frequently in the large cities. It is giving place to another type, more modest in its bearing, and less noisy—the empiric, or quack doctor. He, too, lived in the former centuries, as is shown in an eighteenth-century picture of a wandering surgeon torturing a poor fellow for some trouble in his shoulder (Fig. 1). Another picture (Fig. 2) represents Michel Schuppach, known as the mountain doctor, giving a consultation in his rustic apothecary shop to a lady of the court who has two lords attending her. The corpulent old fellow is calmly looking at the flask containing the potion he is preparing, while a servant is waiting to give him the flasks he will require for completing the mysterious remedy.

Stories of these empirics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might be cited by hundreds. The memoirs of the time are full of recitals of their prowess, and sometimes of their failures. Ducerf had an oil of guaiacum which, whether taken internally or rubbed on, would cause the disappearance of any disease; Caretto, an Italian who pretended to be a marquis, sold a wonderful remedy for two louis d'or per drop. A doctor of Chaudrais, near Mantes, a peasant of much good sense, who sold simples and