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Quack   Listen
noun
Quack  n.  
1.
The cry of the duck, or a sound in imitation of it; a hoarse, quacking noise.
2.
A boastful pretender to medical skill; an empiric; an ignorant practitioner.
3.
Hence, one who boastfully pretends to skill or knowledge of any kind not possessed; a charlatan. "Quacks political; quacks scientific, academical."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Quack" Quotes from Famous Books



... settlement of colored people who have been there for three or four generations, the founder of which, Toby Gilmore, was an old Revolutionary veteran who had served his country faithfully. Stoughton Corner contributed Quack Matrick to the ranks of the Revolutionary soldiers; Lancaster sent Job Lewis, East Bridgewater Prince Richards. So did many other towns and States in this Commonwealth. Rhode Island raised a regiment which did signal service at Red Bank in completely routing the Hessian force under Colonel Donop, ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... matter of fact, we were richer. The captain had the usual sailor's provision of quack medicines, with which, in the usual sailor fashion, he would daily drug himself, displaying an extreme inconstancy, and flitting from Kennedy's Red Discovery to Kennedy's White, and from Hood's Sarsaparilla to Mother Seigel's Syrup. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... but the testimonial-hunter did not reappear. Early on the next morning, however, his pale, thin face and emaciated brows were visible in the shop of the quack-doctor. ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur

... 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 entirely, the ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... is therefore no wonder, if my father could never bring me to any perfection. Secondly, as those that in some dangerous sicknesse, moved with a kind of hope-full and greedie desire of perfect health againe, give eare to every Leach or Emperike, [Footnote: Doctor or quack.] and follow all counsels, the good man being exceedingly fearefull to commit any oversight, in a matter he tooke so to heart, suffered himselfe at last to be led away by the common opinion, which like unto the Cranes, followeth ever those that go before, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... the wags, who in the early freshness of the journey had cried, "Quack, quack," when they went through the water, are now becoming rare and gloomy; gradually the jokers are damped down. The rain begins to fall heavily. The daylight dwindles, and the confusion that is space contracts. The last lingering ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... English newspapers are daily full, particularly of quack medicines and empirics, by means of which many a one here (and among others a German who goes by the name of the German doctor) are become rich. An advertisement of a lottery in the papers begins with capitals in this manner,—"Ten Thousand Pounds for a Sixpence! ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz

... cottages scattered about here and there round the vicarage. Life was so regular and quiet there that you might almost tell the time without looking at the clock. When you heard cling, clang, from the blacksmith's forge, and quack, quack, from the army of ducks waddling down to the river, it was five o'clock. Ding, dong from the church-tower, and the tall figure of Mr Vallance climbing the hill to read prayers—eight o'clock. So on throughout the ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton

... covered with vegetation of some sort, and she has layer upon layer of seeds in the soil for this purpose, and the wonder is that each kind lies dormant until it is wanted. If I uncover the earth in any of my fields, ragweed and pigweed spring up; if these are destroyed, harvest grass, or quack grass, or purslane, appears. The spade or the plow that turns these under is sure to turn up some other variety, as chickweed, sheep-sorrel, or goose-foot. The soil is a storehouse ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... exertions. Though he bore a name already distinguished in the annals of the English landed gentry, he had to make his own fortune under conditions of some difficulty. He was born in North America, and began life, it is said, as a quack doctor. There is also a legend of his having made a first marriage with a person of obscure birth in America. Yet such was the charm of his address, the beauty of his person, the dignity of his bearing, and the vigour of his will, that he succeeded in winning the hands and fortunes ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds

... 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 ...
— Options • O. Henry

... would go; and in the course of the evening his friend Mr. Sowerby congratulated him, and the bishop joked with him and said that he knew that he would not give up good company so soon; and Miss Dunstable said she would make him her chaplain as soon as Parliament would allow quack doctors to have such articles—an allusion which Mark did not understand, till he learned that Miss Dunstable was herself the proprietress of the celebrated Oil of Lebanon, invented by her late respected ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope

... people are willing to make asses of themselves. There's that Achleitner—look at the condescension with which Hahlstroem treats him and the lofty way Hahlstroem plays the role of benefactor! He used to be a riding-master. Then he got mixed up in some quack cure, a combination of Swedish gymnastics and hydrotherapeutics, and his wife left him, a fine, hard-working woman, now doing splendidly as head of a department ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... loud quack; it was the first time he had felt any pain, and at the sound his mother ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various

... all the court was busy plotting and 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 no one ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed

... moon had climbed high above 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 ...
— The Wise Mamma Goose • Charlotte B. Herr

... hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazed with alcohol. His mother cooked for the miners. Her one ambition was that her son should enter a profession. He was apprenticed to a traveling quack dentist and after a fashion, learned ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... was the mamma duck. She was Mrs. Wibblewobble, a nice, white duck, being a cousin to Mrs. Quack-Quack, who once rescued Billie and Johnnie Bushytail, and Jennie Chipmunk from the desert island where they had ...
— Lulu, Alice and Jimmie Wibblewobble • Howard R. Garis

... gulleries and trash to it, especially your Trinidado: your Nicotian is good too. I could say what I know of it for the expulsion of rheums, raw humours, crudities, obstructions, with a thousand of this kind, but I profess myself no quack-salver: only thus much, by Hercules; I do hold it, and will affirm it before any prince in Europe, to be the most sovereign and precious weed that ever the earth tendered to the use ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings

... avarice, our gentleness as folly. Spiders invariably spoil the bees' labour. Therefore, do not mind what opinion the world has of you, good or bad; do not distress yourself about it, whichever it be. To say that we are not what the world thinks, when it speaks well of us, is wise, for the world, like a quack ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus

... extinction. So we got into our wagon, with the fish, and drove to Robinson's tavern, almost five miles off, where we supped and passed the night. In the bar-room was a fat old countryman on a journey, and a quack doctor of the vicinity, and an Englishman with a peculiar accent. Seeing B———'s jointed and brass-mounted fishing-pole, he took it for a theodolite, and supposed that we had been on a surveying expedition. ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... "Betwixt the quack and highwayman, What difference can there be? Tho' this with pistol, that with pen, Both ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... I had noticed a venerable man in a fine blue surtout and a wide-brimmed hat, who sat upon the shaft of a cart and puffed slowly at a great pipe. And as he puffed, he listened intently to the quack-salver's address, and from time to time his eyes would twinkle and his lips curve in an ironic smile. The cart, upon the shaft of which he sat, stood close to a very small, dirty, and disreputable-looking tent, towards which the ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol

... capacity they may have, 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 representations fair ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various

... turning upon him angrily, as his way was; "and it is a very great slander, or rather villainy. Queen Madasima was a very illustrious lady, and it is not to be supposed that so exalted a princess would have made free with a quack; and whoever maintains the contrary lies like a great scoundrel, and I will give him to know it, on foot or on horseback, armed or unarmed, by night or by day, or as ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... way back from the pond of Paddy the Beaver deep in the Green Forest. He had just seen Mr. and Mrs. Quack start toward the Big River for a brief visit before leaving on their long, difficult journey to the far-away Southland. Farewells are always rather sad, and this particular farewell had left Peter with a lump in his throat,—a ...
— The Adventures of Lightfoot the Deer • Thornton W. Burgess

... that lanky quack there?" asked Herr Carovius, pointing to Daniel and looking at Schwalbe the sculptor. He had known Daniel for a long while, but every now and then it gave him a peculiar kind of pleasure to play the ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... 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 print anything but miserable ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson

... is, especially for children, to react to suggestion. The whole life of a child is a response to suggestion. This is about all there is to education. Even older men constantly and readily yield to suggestion. The results gained by quack doctors, lightning-rod agents, promoters and dealers in oil stocks, mining stocks and an endless number of other stocks, show that the right kind of suggestion is bound to produce results. The dressing of the windows ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow

... knave more abandoned, if possible, than Porter, was in the plot. Goodman had been on the stage, had been kept, like some much greater men, by the Duchess of Cleveland, had been taken into her house, had been loaded by her with gifts, and had requited her by bribing an Italian quack to poison two of her children. As the poison had not been administered, Goodman could be prosecuted only for a misdemeanour. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to a ruinous fine. He had since distinguished himself as one of the first ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... from fifteen to twenty thousand men at Waterford, in September, 1883, Michael Davitt said, "It was better for all concerned that the truth should be plainly and bluntly told, in order that English quack statesmen might be saved the trouble of proposing half measures to satisfy the Irish people.... Let the landlords of Ireland resign their unpopular positions, follow the example of Captain Boycott, and nobody would molest them, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various

... that he stole away from the house, and whereas no one could find him, we feared for a long time that he had done himself a mischief. Nevertheless he was alive and of good heart. He had passed the months in a various life; first as a crier to a wandering quack, and afterwards, inasmuch as he was a nimble and likely lad, he had waited on the guests at one of the best frequented inns at Wurzberg. It came then to pass that his eminence Cardinal Branda, Nuncio from his Holiness the Pope, took up his quarters there, and he carried ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... will admit of a cure, yet I am confident, that no invalid was ever made a healthy man by the mere power of drugs. If this is a truth, should it not be universally known? If it were, there would undoubtedly be an end of quackery, for all quack medicines, from the balm of Gilead, to the botanical syrup, are supposed to cure diseases, or at least asserted to do so, in this ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett

... city of the sixteenth century does not 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 given him builds a cloth-mill on the site of his ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... growing unpopularity of Buckingham, the king absolutely refused to abandon his favourite, against whom all kinds of rumours were astir. Nothing was too bad to be believed of him, and popular fury spared neither him nor his friends. Dr. Lamb, an astrologer and quack doctor, was set upon in the city as being one of the latter, and was nearly done to death one night whilst returning home from supper. None would receive into his house the almost lifeless body of the necromancer—the duke's ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe

... the Spaniard understands above all other men. The dealers in coloured handkerchiefs from Barcelona or mantillas from Seville were driving a great trade, and the majority of them had long since shouted themselves hoarse. A few quack dentists were operating upon their victims under the friendly covert of a big drum and a bassoon. Dealers in wonderful drugs and herbs were haranguing the crowd, easily gaining the attention of the simple peasants by handling a live ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman

... 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 ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston

... enthusiasm! Truth was no longer respected. When I next presented myself to the 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 ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various

... Progress, and Mariage a la Mode. The intensity and power of that terrible genius would have had their attraction, but the minute ferocities of Hogarth's ruthless irony would certainly have revolted him. Such a scene as Lord Squanderfield's visit to the quack doctor, or as the Rake's debauch, would have filled him with inextinguishable horror. He could never have forgiven an artist who, in the ghastly pathos of a little child straining from the arms of its nurse towards the mother, as she lies in the very article of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... telephoned to Delmas to take her to the Baldwyn Theatre, where she has engaged a box for this evening—fondly hoping that the diamonds will bring him up to the scratch, and that he will propose to her. When I saw her she was on her way to a notorious quack doctor and beauty specialist in Californian Street. She suffers from some nasty skin disease, and is in mortal terror lest Delmas should get to know of it, and also of the fact that all her teeth are false, and that two of her toes are ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell

... favourable spot,—a place where four roads meet is that, if possible, generally chosen,—he hangs the unfortunate duck by the leg to the branch of a neighbouring tree, which, as if divining the part that he is intended to play in the piece, flaps his wings, and begins to cry and quack most vehemently. ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle

... Times catches my eye (it just came in) and something from the Lancet is extracted, a long article against quackery—and, as I say, this is the first and only sentence I read—'There is scarcely a peer of the realm who is not the patron of some quack pill or potion: and the literati too, are deeply tainted. We have heard of barbarians who threw quacks and their medicines into the sea: but here in England we have Browning, a prince of poets, touching the pitch which defiles and making Paracelsus the hero of ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... Quack advertisements injurious. Preface. Quadrupeds have no sanguiferous lochia, xxxviii. 2. —— have nothing similar to the yolk of egg, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... was a traitor to the Constitution and a secret agent of the Wilhelmstrasse. And thus there were American pathologists and bacteriologists who denounced Prof. Dr. Paul Ehrlich as little better than a quack hired by the Krupps to poison Americans, and who displayed their pious horror of the late Prof. Dr. Robert Koch by omitting all acknowledgment of obligation to him from their monographs. And finally there was the posse of "two thousand ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan

... be much extended. When metallic medicines were first introduced into general use by a physician, an ancestor of mine, and the wonderful effect of them established by the cures, the whole fraternity was up in arms, and he was decried us a quack; notwithstanding which, the works he wrote have gone through twenty five editions, and the doses prescribed by him are to this day made use of by ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... to me in America; they are spare and pallid. Not many ruddy complexions. Why all these sharp-faced, lantern-jawed, lean, sallow, hard-handed people? Why this depression of spirits? Perhaps they really get a thrill out of religion after all. Why all these advertisements of quack remedies, why all this calling on God? This is a place of bright sunshine and exhilarating air. After all, I ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... 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 dull ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... experiences are accumulated to found a hypothesis, and all contradictory phenomena are either ignored, or the meaning of words is changed according to the requirements of the reasoning. Nor is it only the philosophical quack who employs these conjuring tricks to deceive the public; without being conscious of it, the most upright and the least prejudiced thinker uses analogous means to satisfy his thirst for knowledge directly that he issues from the only sphere where reason ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... time when pigs spoke rhyme And monkeys chewed tobacco, And hens took snuff to make them tough, And ducks went quack, ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)

... than it was before. If you rub unguent into your scanty hair you can feel it grow, as a poet hears the grass. A nostrum on your toil-hardened hands brings back, to keen anticipation, the skin of youth. All mankind is prepared to a perfect degree of sensitiveness for response to the quack doctor's art. We believe so fast that he need hardly do more than open his mouth to cry his wares. The colonel, doing a good day's work and getting tired enough to sleep at night, felt, on waking, ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown

... O slattern place, Is glory in your slack disgrace? Plump quack doctors sell their pills, Gentle grafters sell brass watches, Silly anarchists yell their ills. Shall we be as weird as these? In the ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay

... should never be confiscated for any cause whatever. Great discontent existed among the people that Law had been suffered to escape. The mob and the Parliament would have been pleased to have seen him hanged. The few who had not suffered by the commercial revolution, rejoiced that the quack had left the country; but all those (and they were by far the most numerous class) whose fortunes were implicated, regretted that his intimate knowledge of the distress of the country, and of the causes that had led to it, had not been rendered more ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... written on the pages of the records of man's progress. Likewise must the quack doctor and the ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter

... a serjeant or bailiff; a paunbroker; a prison; a tavern; a scold; a bad husband; a town-fop; a bawd; a fair and happy milk-maid; the quack's directory; a ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle

... 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 of the ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil

... some years past they have not been advertised in newspapers, they being filled with sensational advertisements of quack nostrums got up for no other purpose ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw

... 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 ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... 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

... But he did know that warm and angry glow for the reflection of London's light and life; he could not forget he was in London for a moment. Her mighty machinery with its million wheels throbbed perpetually in his ears; and yet between the beats would come the quack of a wild duck near at hand, the splash of a leaping fish, the plaintive whistle of water-fowl: altogether such a chorus of incongruities as was not lost upon our very impressionable young vagabond. The booming strokes of eleven recalled him to ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung

... The advertising quack who wearies With tales of countless cures, His teeth, I've enacted, Shall all be extracted By terrified amateurs: The music-hall singer attends a series Of masses and fugues and "ops" By Bach, interwoven With Spohr and Beethoven, At classical Monday Pops: The billiard ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert

... the most part their enthusiasm is adopted to suit the time and opportunity— to practise imposture upon the British and Austrian millionaires. In painting and gemmary, Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack— but in the matter of old wines he was sincere. In this respect I did not differ from him materially: I was skillful in the Italian vintages myself, and bought largely whenever ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe

... proper feeding. They think there is some fakery about it, for their professors, books and experience have taught them otherwise. They consider the views of the natural healer unworthy of serious attention and often call him a quack, which epithet closes the discussion. They are ethical and do not wish to be mired ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker

... sailors that sat upon the deck Were four and twenty white mice with chains about their necks. The captain was a duck with a packet on his back, And when the ship began to move the captain cried quack! quack! ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft

... of Ben Jonson (1610). The other two are Vol'pone (2 syl.), (1605), and The Silent Woman (1609). The object of The Alchemist is to ridicule the belief in the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life. The alchemist is "Subtle," a mere quack; and "sir Epicure Mammon" is the chief dupe, who supplies money, etc., for the "transmutation of metal." "Abel Drugger" a tobacconist, and "Dapper" a lawyer's clerk, are two other dupes. "Captain Face," alias "Jeremy," the house-servant of "Lovewit," and "Dol Common" are his allies. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... your pamphlets into two classes—the important, 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, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... a 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

... 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

... 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

... sailors That stood between the decks, Were four-and-twenty white mice With rings about their necks. The captain was a duck, a duck, With a jacket on his back, And when this fairy ship set sail, The captain he said, "Quack!" ...
— The Baby's Bouquet - A Fresh Bunch of Rhymes and Tunes • Walter Crane

... you do if asked to hold a consultation with a practitioner whom you have every reason to suppose an incapable quack? ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various

... 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 king recovered ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... individual; but so far as my knowledge goes the United States stands out as preeminently the "Land of Contrasts"—the land of stark, staring, and stimulating inconsistency; at once the home of enlightenment and the happy hunting ground of the charlatan and the quack; a land in which nothing happens but the unexpected; the home of Hyperion, but no less the haunt of the satyr; always the land of promise, but not invariably the land of performance; a land which may be bounded by the ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... he, lookin' alfired peart and smeart, as tho' he'd seen a flock o' l'fants; 'quack ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley

... retires, from his toils to relax, The scourge of impostors, the terror of quacks: 80 Come, all ye quack bards, and ye quacking divines, Come, and dance on the spot where your tyrant reclines: When Satire and Censure encircl'd his throne, I fear'd for your safety, I fear'd for my own; But now he is gone, and we want a detector, 85 Our Dodds shall ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith

... of age had just been carried off to the hospital with his foot cut clean off at the ankle by one of these marine monsters. His family were howling with fury. They wished to keep the youngster with them. The negro quack doctor pretended that he could have cured him in two days, and that the white "quacks" would leave him ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... physicians and surgeons did make substantial charges and since the educated layman could buy his own books on medicine and practice what he read or since the uneducated could turn to a neighbor with medical knowledge or to a quack, the question arises as to why the services of professional surgeons and physicians were in such demand. Part of the answer lies in the professional's experience, but even in a colony without a medical school it also lies in the education and training ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes

... the Privy Council ordered Stukely, 'all delays set apart,' to bring the body of Sir Walter Raleigh speedily to London. Two days later, Stukely and his prisoner started from Plymouth. A French quack, called Mannourie, in whose chemical pretensions Raleigh had shown some interest, was encouraged by Stukely to attend him, and to worm himself into his confidence. As Walter and Elizabeth Raleigh passed the beautiful Sherborne which had once been theirs, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse

... 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 ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning

... the numerous quack aphrodisiacs current in the middle ages, as with us cock's cullions ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous

... upon its wings. It seemed almost inhuman to kill the sweet little songster, particularly as it was the only creature I saw in the Arctic that uttered a pleasant note. All other sounds were such as the scream of the hawk and the gull, the quack of the duck, the yell of the wolf, the "Ooff! ooff!" of the walrus, or the bark of the seal—all harsh and unmelodious, save the tones of this sweet little singer. Nothing but starvation or scientific research ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder

... most 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 ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde

... quack, quack! I have brought your chicken back!" "Oh!" says Biddy, "cluck, cluck, cluck! Thank you!—thank you! ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various

... 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 over his head to keep it cool. ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston

... say, as a writer once said, that it was impossible for a girl to succeed on the stage without impaired morals, is a statement as untrue as to say that no man can succeed as a lawyer unless he be a rogue, a doctor unless he be a quack, a parson ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles

... While the 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, thus affording the ...
— The Foolish Dictionary • Gideon Wurdz

... wholly at heart a knave, I fancy, among whose dupes is himself. Did you not see our quack friend apply to himself his own quackery? A fanatic quack; essentially a fool, though ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... employ the cheapest physician, without regard to his ability to kill or cure; some will treat diseases in their incipiency with quack medicines, bought cheap, hoping thereby to fend off the doctor's bill. Some women seem to be pursued by an evil demon of economy, which, like an ignis fatuus in a bog, delights constantly to tumble them over into the mire of expense. They are dismayed at the ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... 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 motley ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... the administration except it is the opposition: but an opposition, bedrid and tonguetied, is a most ridiculous body. Mr. Pitt is laid up with the gout; Lord Hardwicke, though much relieved by a quack medicine, is still very ill; and Mr. Charles Townshend is as silent as my Lord Abercorn(406—that they too should ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... 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. ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... of "The Times'" popularity has been its occasional advocacy of the public interest to its own temporary loss. Early in its history it ridiculed the advertisers of quack medicines, and has never hesitated to expose unsound projects though ever so profusely advertised. During the railroad mania of 1845, when the railroad advertisements in "The Times" averaged sixty thousand dollars a week, it earnestly, eloquently, and every day, ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton

... were red, that I might brew Invention there that might be Poison too. Were I a drowzy Judge, whose dismal Note Disgorges Halters, as a Juggler's Throat Does Ribbons; could I in Sir Empyrick's Tone Speak Pills in Phrase, and quack Destruction; Or roar like Marshal, that Geneva Bull, Hell and Damnation a Pulpit full: Yet to express a Scot, to play that Prize, Not all those Mouth-Granadoes can suffice. Before a Scot can properly be curst, I must, like Hocus, ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid

... by the sharp shot of Dr Horne of Oxford's wit, in the character of 'One of the People called Christians', is still prefixed to Mr Home's excellent History of England, like a poor invalid on the piquet guard, or like a list of quack medicines sold by the same bookseller, by whom a work of whatever nature is published; for it has no connection with his History, let it have what it may with what are called his Philosophical Works. A worthy friend of mine in London was lately consulted ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... five foot deep, lies on his back A cobbler, star-monger, and quack; Who to the stars in pure good-will Does to his best look upward still. Weep, all you customers that use His pills, his almanacs, or shoes: And you that did your fortunes seek, Step to his grave ...
— English Satires • Various

... for what sober men called law and order. Feeding his spirit of revolution were numerous anarchistic theories, called the new philosophy, which had this curious quality: that they hotly denied the old faith, law, morality, as other men formulated such matters, and fervently believed any quack who appeared with a new nostrum warranted ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... setting his goblet down with a bang upon the polished table, after draining it to the bottom. "I would like to go through that mob again! and I would pull an oar in the galleys of Marseilles rather than be questioned with that air of authority by a botanizing quack like La Galissoniere! Such villainous questions as he asked me about the state of the royal magazines! La Galissoniere had more the air of a judge cross-examining a culprit than of a Governor asking information of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... be cited as typical remedies, acting through the patient's imagination and possessing no intrinsic curative properties, yet nevertheless valuable articles of the pharmacopoeia from the standpoint of suggestive therapeutics. In a list of Japanese quack medicines, of the present time, we find mention ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... doctor?" asked the porter. "She has something to do besides curing sick starvelings. Besides, that is not her office. Go to Imhotep or to Chunsu the counsellor, or to the great Techuti herself, who helps the sick. There is no quack medicine ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... 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 ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins

... two sisters, sensible, benevolent women. They were not of that race of fine ladies who are miserable the moment they come to THE COUNTRY; nor yet were they of that bustling sort, who quack and direct all their poor neighbours, for the mere love of managing, or the want of something to do. They were judiciously generous; and whilst they wished to diffuse happiness, they were not peremptory ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth

... same reason (distance and lack of roads) the boys and girls do not attend schools, and what little they know they learn from some ignorant teachers (maestrillos). People, ordinarily of bad life, escaped from other towns, some of whom are also quack doctors and bone-setters who at the same time that they are teaching the Cartilla and a little bit of the Catechism imbue the children with a thousand and one superstitions and all kinds of vices. The ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera

... 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 ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day

... 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

... (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

... and quinine for everything I've ever had since I knew you," said Beth. "If I have any more of it, I shall be like the man in the quack advertisement, who felt he could conscientiously recommend a tonic because he had taken it for fourteen years. I should like something that ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... all went to the pond, and Johnny put in his boat. It sailed right out among the ducks, and they were much afraid of it, and swam away as fast as they could, saying, "Quack, quack, quack!" ...
— The Nursery, No. 165. September, 1880, Vol. 28 - A Monthly Magazine For Youngest Readers • Various

... tried to make the duck come over and carry her, but the duck said, "Quack! Quack!" and shook ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs

... the farm! I love for to wander in the grass-green fields— Oh, a country life has the charm! I love for to wander in the garden— Down by the old haystack; Where the pretty little chickens go 'Kick-Kack-Kackle!' And the little docks go 'Quack! Quack!'" ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice

... 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

... 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)

... feathers and doesn't say quack," replied Mally from below. "No, darling, you're not a goose; you're Mally's good boy. Now, run back ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge

... "I've had it in my mind for years. It's the personal note that's so valuable. This brings the whole passing world into personal contact with me. It shows that Sypher's Cure isn't a quack thing run by a commercial company, but the possession of a man who has a house, who lives in the very house you can see through the trees. 'What kind of a man is he?' they ask. 'He must be a nice man to ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... at length, when he threatens it with the mystic formula of the Trinity, it dissolves into mist, and out of the mist steps forth Mephistopheles, dressed as a 'travelling scholar'—an itinerant professor, or quack doctor. ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill

... 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 in ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat

... 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 ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand

... New 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 by their education. ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... wit and humor, but rarely the slightest real success; and the apparent success was a terrible satire on the attempt; the Evil Genius of man laughed the loudest at his best jokes. The advertisements, as I have said, such as were serious, and not of the modern quack kind, suggested pleasing and poetic thoughts; for commerce is really as interesting as nature. The very names of the commodities were poetic, and as suggestive as if they had been inserted in a pleasing poem,—Lumber, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... 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

... Plays," viii., ix. See also, e.g., as specimens of comical scenes, the discussions between the quack and his man in the "Play of the Sacrament": "Ye play of ye conversyon of ser Jonathas ye Jewe by myracle of ye blyssed sacrament." Master Brundyche addresses the audience as if he were in front of his booth ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... these a constant stream of strange vagabonds drifted along the road: minstrels who wandered from fair to fair, a foul and pestilent crew; jugglers and acrobats, quack doctors and tooth-drawers, students and beggars, free workmen in search of better wages, and escaped bondsmen who would welcome any wages at all. Such was the throng which set the old road smoking in a haze of white dust from Winchester ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... very fine farm 'Way down in the fields of Older. With a quack-quack here, And a quack-quack there, Here and there a quack-quack, Quack-quack here and there, Down ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... no Fosbrokes!' he said. 'I will have no village apothecaries diagnosing my disease, no ignorant quack telling me ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... the originator of the system, he appears eventually to have profited but little by his schemes. "He was a quack," says Voltaire, "to whom the state was given to be cured, but who poisoned it with his drugs, and who poisoned himself." The effects which he left behind in France were sold at a low price and the proceeds dissipated. His landed estates were confiscated. ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... high disdain; "as if I'd put myself again under that quack's thumb. No, sir!" and snapping his fingers derisively at Ben, he straightened up jauntily on his somewhat uncertain feet. "All I want is a little air," stumbling off ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney

... 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 ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope

... to be found out, and reported to George Bickley, a miserable quack and 'confidence man,' a person long familiarly spoken of by the press as a mere Jeremy Diddler, but who has been a useful tool to shrewder men in managing for them this precious Order. The member is to do all in his power to 'build up a public sentiment in his State favorable to the K.G.C., and to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... knew, too, and trusted and respected the judgment of Mrs. Festus Willard, whose friendship was tantamount to a certificate of character and eligibility. As against that, he set the unforgotten picture of the itinerant quack, vending his poison across the countryside, playing on desperate fears and tragic hopes, coining his dollars from the grimmest of false dies; and now that same quack,—powerful, rich, generous, popular, master of the good things of life,—still draining out his millions ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... 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 where ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... Herr Paul from Vienna. He had started forthwith, leaving several unpaid accounts to a more joyful opportunity, amongst them a chemist's bill, for a wonderful quack medicine of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... to ordinary people. But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probable that there is something in it, after all. The honest man is he who is always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable; but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton

... in pretension to that which we have been examining and as far superior to it in real utility as the prescriptions of a great physician, varying with every stage of every malady and with the constitution of every patient, to the pill of the advertising quack which is to cure all human beings, in ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... secret even from his friendly legal adviser Fortescue; and Fortescue innocently requested Pope to get up evidence to support a charge of libel against his own organ. The evidence which Pope collected—in defence of a quack-doctor, Ward—was not, as we may suppose, very valuable. Two volumes of the Grub-street Journal were printed in 1737, and a fragment or two was admitted by Pope into his works. It is said, in the preface to the collected pieces, that the journal ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... mother's abode, one room on the second floor, to which Mr Vanslyperken proceeded, as soon as he had taken the necessary steps for the replacing, of the boat. As he ascended the stairs, the quack ear of the old woman heard his footstep, and recognised it. It must be observed, that all the conversation between Vanslyperken and his mother was carried on in Dutch, of which we, of ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat

... 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, ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris

... 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 ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... a sudden frost had nipped all my thoughts, I grew suddenly conscious that the first ceremony I assisted at with Aniela was a funeral. As a person in long sickness, having lost faith in medicine, turns to quack doctors and wise women, so the sick soul, doubting everything, still clings to ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... vigorously fought by laymen as well as physicians. Quacks live by lying and misleading advertisements. Every one should cooperate to encourage the movement by which newspapers and magazines are giving up quack and immoral advertisements and the advertisements of alcoholic beverages. Especially should we refuse to patronize the quack advertiser. When no one is deceived by him, he will cease to advertise. A more immediate ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk

... fair to say that Doctor Perkins, a former resident of the village, was a quack; he may be described in milder phrase as an irregular practitioner. He belonged to none of the accepted schools, but treated his patients in accordance with certain theories of his own. The doctor had a habit of relating ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)

... commencement of his acquaintance with the famous Arise Evans, a Welsh prophet: whose "Echo from Heaven," &c., 2 parts, 1652, 12mo., is a work noticed by Warburton, and coveted by bibliomaniacs. Yet one more quack-medicine entry: "March 11, 1681. I took early in the morning a good dose of Elixir, and hung three spiders about my neck, and they drove my ague away—Deo gratias!" p. 359. It seems that Ashmole always punctually ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... at once become my masters and I their pupil. If I were to have asked them how to translate the first two words of Matthew "Liber Generationis" into German, not one of them would have been able to say "Quack!" And they judge all my works! Fine fellows! It was also like this for St. Jerome when he translated the Bible. Everyone was his master. He alone was entirely incompetent as people, who were not good enough to clean his boots, judged his works. This ...
— An Open Letter on Translating • Gary Mann

... of angels written on them. One such charm, however, published by Horwitz, I cannot refrain from mentioning, as it is very curious and practical. It constitutes a never-failing antidote to forgetfulness, and, for aught I know, may be quite as efficacious as some of the quack mnemonic systems ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams

... "Quack-quack! Take me out! Oh, take me out!" cried poor Fluffy-dumpty. The other six ducks crowded around and ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various

... up, and 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

... find opium consumed in different ways. In England it is either used in a solid state, made into pills, or a tincture in the shape of laudanum. Insidiously it is given to children under a variety of quack forms, such as "Godfrey's cordial," &c. In India the pure opium is either dissolved in water and so used, or rolled into pills. It is there a common practice to give it to children when very young, by mothers, who require to work and cannot at the same time nurse their ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... an 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 hands. "So, ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac

... 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 ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford

... gazed at him in mute surprise; then hurried, with every variety of squeak, and quack, and fluttering wing, from his ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne

... settled. That they are not noxious to some animals is plain: for ducks, buzzards, owls, stone curlews, and snakes, eat them, to my knowledge, with impunity. And I well remember the time, but was not eye-witness to the fact (though numbers of persons were), when a quack, at this village, ate a toad to make the country people ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White

... sacred to the practical man of the present age, especially when he happens to dwell on the other side of the Atlantic. There he uses the wonders of Nature as advertising boards for puffing quack medicines or patent stoves, and the picturesque and the grandiose are only appreciated by him in proportion to ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... whinny [horse]; bray [donkey, mule, hinny, ass]; mew, mewl [kitten]; meow [cat]; purr [cat]; caterwaul, pule [cats]; baa[obs3], bleat [lamb]; low, moo [cow, cattle]; troat[obs3], croak, peep [frog]; coo [dove, pigeon]; gobble [turkeys]; quack [duck]; honk, gaggle, guggle [obs3][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 ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... the horrent shapes of Night and Acheron, to mingle in the pure river of humanity the poison-taint of their protean vileness? Do you know that in your schools one-quarter of the children are already purblind? Have you gauged the importance of your tremendous consumption of quack catholicons, of the fortunes derived from their sale, of the spread of modern nervous disorders, of toothless youth and thrice loathsome age among the helot-classes? Do you know that in the course of my late journey to London, I walked from Piccadilly Circus to Hyde Park Corner, during ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel

... 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 the country ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)



Words linked to "Quack" :   quack-quack, quack grass, unqualified, utter, let loose, medicine, charlatan, doc, mountebank, md, emit, let out, sound, act



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