Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Quack   /kwæk/   Listen
Quack

adjective
1.
Medically unqualified.



Related searches:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Quack" Quotes from Famous Books



... 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 ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... political machine, which alarms older and more experienced heads: if he was not himself the first to get out of harm's way and escape from the danger, it would be well!—We hold, indeed, as a general rule, that no man born or bred in Scotland can be a great orator, unless he is a mere quack; or a great statesman unless he turns plain knave. The national gravity is against the first: the national caution is against the last. To a Scotchman if a thing is, it is; there is an end of the question with his opinion about it. He is positive ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... a sensible man like John Bull to be placed in by a blethering idiot, 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.)

... assistance against the inroads of the bee-moth, but they are so constructed as positively to aid it in its nefarious designs. The more they are used, the worse the poor bees are off: just as the more a man uses the lying nostrums of the brazen-faced quack, the further he finds himself from health ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... Madame de Pompadour treated Saint-Germain as a person of consequence. 'He is a quack, for he says he has an elixir,' said Dr. Quesnay, with medical scepticism. 'Moreover, our master, the King, is obstinate; he sometimes speaks of Saint-Germain as a ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang

... one who mourns over our fall and pities us, gladdens in our virtue, and shall not leave us till we die; an ideal self, who is our judgment? and if it be yet answered that this in truth is so, and might be borne but for the errors of the idealizing temperament, shall we not reply that the quack does not discredit the art of medicine, nor the demagogue the art of politics, and no more does the fool in all his motley the ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... 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 ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... would have laughed at the very imposing draught, that was said to cure lords and ladies of this jumble between apoplexy and paralysis; but this was no moment for laughing, and he was in despair at fancying his mother wanted to lead her off on the quack medicine; ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge

... tell you something about the famous religious festival which took me amongst the Indians, and thereby caused, the foregoing first preamble,—the ennui produced by which I proceed to cure, like a quack doctor, by doubling the dose. Accordingly, here comes a second preamble, by way of introductory explanation of what is to come ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... merits of another 'Medical Infirmary,' under his own special supervision, at No. 110 Church street, Charleston. The doctor, after inveighing loudly against 'men totally ignorant of medical science,' who flood the country with quack nostrums backed up by 'fabricated proofs of miraculous cures,' proceeds to enumerate the diseases to which his 'Infirmary' is open, and to which his practice will be mainly confined. Appreciating ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... comparative philologists that this was impossible, because the languages spoken through that wide region, demonstrated that its inhabitants must have had a common descent, he could only answer that as ducks quack everywhere, he could not see why men should not everywhere speak the ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge

... mostly on roots and plants, but is fond of mussels or fresh-water clams, fish, some insects and, I am sorry to say, young birds when he can catch them. Jerry could explain where some of the babies of Mr. And Mrs. Quack the Ducks have disappeared to. Paddy the Beaver ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess

... the shadowy flood, Save rare sharp stridence (that means "quack"), Low amber light in Ariel track Athwart the dun (that ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... about 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. "We must chew our gall, and bide our time," they say, when the too powerful ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... long time, when the 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 was a ...
— The Wise Mamma Goose • Charlotte B. Herr

... his left hand a canvas banner, upon which were painted six or eight pictures, coarsely designed like those found in strolling fairs. In his right he waved a little switch, with which he would every now and then strike his banner, like a quack retailing his wares. ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau

... He was solicited to cure "all the ills that flesh is heir to." He was not aware (any more than the reader very possibly may be) that in some parts of England the country people have an idea that a quack doctor rides a piebald horse; why, I cannot explain, but so it is, and that poor Dumps felt to his cost. Life became a burthen to him; he was a marked man; he, whose only wish was to pass unnoticed, unheard, unseen; he, who ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 389, September 12, 1829 • Various

... five foot deep, lies on his back, A Cobbler, Starmonger, 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 Almanacks, or Shoes! And you that did your fortunes seek, Step to this grave, but once a week! This earth which bears his body's print ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe

... Having found a 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

... diligent devils never fail to haunt them, so that there are more outcries of 'Stop thief!' at their door, and more constables fetched to that shop, than to all the shops in the row. There was a brave trade at that shop in Mr—'s time: he was a true shopkeeper; like the quack doctor, you never missed him from seven in the morning till twelve, and from two till nine at night, and he throve accordingly—he left a good estate behind him. But I don't know what these people are; ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe

... find yourself really ill, send for a good physician. Have nothing to do with quacks; and do not tamper with quack medicines. You do not know what they are; and what security have you that they know ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child

... of Borrow's Norwich life was William Taylor, concerning whom we have already written much. It was a Jew named Mousha, a quack it appears, who pretended to know German and Hebrew, and had but a smattering of either language, who first introduced Borrow to Taylor, and there is a fine dialogue between the two in Lavengro, of which ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... weather was splendidly bright, and the sun shone on all the green trees. The Mother Duck went down to the water with all her little ones. Splash! she jumped into the water. "Quack! quack!" she said, and then one duckling after another plunged in. The water closed over their heads, but they came up in an instant and swam capitally; their legs went of themselves, and there they were, all in the water. The ugly gray Duckling ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... Bob's mouth, she very naturally concluded that they were grains of rice left by the careless quadruped. Acting upon this theory, she hastily essayed to seize the morsel. The impact of her bill upon his nose woke Bob in terrible indignation. A short scuffle and a plaintive quack, and that duck's career was ended. But that was not all. So serious did the bulldog consider this insult to his dignity that, in spite of repeated castigations, he never rested until he had killed the whole of the remaining brood ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold

... gather up your strength so as to be able to foot it with me and not break down. But first of all, I must say I very much wish you had some costume a little less marked than that of an English lady. Now, if you could pass as a peasant-girl, or an old woman, or a goatherd's wife, or a vender of quack medicines, or anything humble and ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille

... course of a speech delivered at a mass meeting of 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, but ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various

... involving thousands of families in ruin and despair. Law, after bravely trying to save the situation and narrowly escaping being torn in pieces, fled to poverty and death at Venice, and the financial state of France was worse than before. Law was not, however, absolutely a quack; there was a seed of good in his famous system of mobilising credit, and the temporary stimulus it gave to trade permanently ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... "Quack! quack!" said the duck; and all the babies quacked too. Then they looked all around. The mother let them look as much as they liked, for green is ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate

... Tsomass ends. When they approached the river mouth, they saw extending from the bank a salmon trap, and even to-day, the Indians will show at Lup-se-kup-se some old rotten sticks, which they affirm formed part of that same trap. The land was green, the wild duck's quack was heard among the reeds which edged the river bank, while flocks of geese were feeding on the grass which grows thickly upon the tidal flats, the flats the ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael

... the mountain-cure again, and set out with his friend Richard Fall for a tour in Wales. But his father recalled him to Leamington to try iron and dieting under Dr. Jephson, who, if he was called a quack, was a sensible one, and successful in subduing for several years to come the more serious phases of the disease. The patient was not cured; he suffered from time to time from his chest, and still more from a weakness of the spine, which during all the period of his early manhood gave him trouble, ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood

... youths, who spend their days in trying to build up their constitutions by sport or athletics and their evenings in undermining them with poisonous and dyed drinks; our daughters, who are ever searching for some new quack remedy for new imaginary megrim, what strength is there in them? We have our societies for the prevention of this and the promotion of that and the propagation of the other, because there are no individuals among us. Our sexes are already nearly assimilate. Women ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm

... families, wholly and entirely to his own 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 ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds

... metaphysics or theosophy, and some of his English followers seem to have allied themselves with the famous Astrologer William Lilly, whose prophetic Almanacks, under the title of Merlinus Anglicus, had been appearing annually since 1644. But indeed all sorts of men were in contact with this quack or quack-mystic. He had been consulted by Charles I as to the probable issue of events; he had been consulted and feed by partisans of the other side: his Almanacks, with their hieroglyphics and political predictions, had a boundless popularity, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... with talk about a curious impostor, known to his followers as the Great Mexican Seer, and supposed to be gifted with second sight, as well as with endless other supernatural powers. Now, it is a peculiarity of my able brother-in-law's that, when he meets with a quack, he burns to expose him; he is so keen a man of business himself that it gives him, so to speak, a disinterested pleasure to unmask and detect imposture in others. Many ladies at the hotel, some of whom had met and conversed with the Mexican Seer, were constantly telling ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen

... it is a remarkable peculiarity in the mind of man, that it can frequently be set at ease by some self-constructed theory which would not bear its own examination for a minute—as if a quack were to treat himself with his own bread-pills and feel better—Mark, having convinced himself that the reviewer was a crass fool whose praise and blame were to be read conversely, found the wound to his self-love begin to ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey

... repentance; 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 ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... is not without its faults. The story of the quack, borrowed from Boileau, was not worth the importation; he has confounded ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... the country. 'But may not many people be far more worthy of the appointment than myself?' said the writer. 'Where?' said the friendly Radical. 'If you don't get it it will be made a job of, given to the son of some steward, or, perhaps, to some quack who has done dirty work. I tell you what, I shall ask it for you, in spite of you; I shall, indeed!' and his eyes flashed with friendly and patriotic fervour through the large pair ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... assistance, and forbade any one not called by him to enter his room. Only the quick coming of death prevented him from ending his life with a crime; for in a fit of anger at the curandero, a sort of quack doctor who attended him, he sprang from his bed, snatched up his sword, and rushed furiously upon the trembling wretch. Before he could reach his intended victim he fell down in a fit of apoplexy. No one dared to disregard his orders ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris

... a black plaster, given to her at Singen by a quack, the stump of her foot had become sore again, and sharp pain tortured her so cruelly that, especially when the cough racked her emaciated body and she was jolted to and fro in the springless cart over stony roads, she was afraid that she should ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... 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

... 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

... son of a Khooghra's doing?" Gerd asked. "He and that—" He used a couple of Sheshan words, viler than anything in Lingua Terra. "—that quack headshrinker, Mallin, are preparing a report, accusing you and Ben Rainsford of perpetrating a deliberate scientific hoax. You taught the Fuzzies some tricks; you and Rainsford, between you, made those artifacts yourselves and the two of you are conspiring ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper

... entreated Cesar to go to bed, and they sent for his old friend Monsieur Haudry. The old man was a physician of the school of Moliere, a great practitioner and in favor of the old-fashioned formulas, who dosed his patients neither more nor less than a quack, consulting physician though he was. He came, studied the expression of Cesar's face, and observing symptoms of cerebral congestion, ordered an immediate application of mustard plasters to the soles of ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac

... secretion 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 young man from ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall

... astonishing how many 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 ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... of them with which we may deceive ourselves and others, we shall be obliged to confess that we always act our creed. A man's conduct, just because he is man, is generated by his view of himself and his world. He who cheats his neighbour believes in tortuosity, and, as Carlyle says, has the Supreme Quack for his God. No one ever acted without some dim, though perhaps foolish enough, half-belief that the world was at his back; whether he plots good or evil he always has God as an accomplice. And this is why character ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... 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 Mildred could ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau

... means. Of all other sorts of men I declare myself tired. They're tedious failures. When I was on earth, professors of all sorts prowled round me feeling for an unhealthy spot in me on which they could fasten. The doctors of medicine bade me consider what I must do to save my body, and offered me quack cures for imaginary diseases. I replied that I was not a hypochondriac; so they called me Ignoramus and went their way. The doctors of divinity bade me consider what I must do to save my soul; but I was not a spiritual hypochondriac ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... 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 activities ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini

... two children, mournful very, Seeing neither bridge nor ferry; Take us upon your white back, And row us over, quack, quack!" ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various

... 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, ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... 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

... "cotton-shovels," "fifteen-inch sweeps," "twenty-inch sweeps," "team-ploughs with seven-inch twisters," and a "finishing sweep of twenty-six inches." He hears of other inventions, and orders them. The South is flooded with a thousand quack contrivances now, about as applicable to cotton-raising as a pair of nut-crackers; but the colonel buys them. He is going to dispense with the hoe. That is the plan; and by that plan of furnishing a large plantation with new tools before Lent is over the five thousand ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various

... 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

... craft were turning their attention to matters more useful to the human family—digging cellars, wheeling baggage, driving teams, &c. So lawyer Bunker turned his attention from Blackstone, Chitty, Coke on Littleton, and those fellows of deep-red, blue-black law, to the manufacture of quack nostrums. Bunker found that the great appetite we Yankees have for quack medicines, pills and powders, suffered no diminution in the gold country; on the contrary, the appetite became rather sharpened for those luxuries, ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley

... sum go out of the family. Dinaea fell ill, and he brought her his own physician. The patient refused the man's services; they had been fatal, she said, to all her kinsfolk. Oppianicus then contrived to introduce to her a traveling quack from Ancona. He had bribed the man with about seventeen pounds of our money to administer a deadly drug. The fee was large, and the fellow was expected to take some pains with the business; but he was in a hurry; he had many markets to visit; ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church

... In some parts of Syria, as in Arabia, almost every ill and affection is attributed to the rheums, or called so. Rheumatism, for instance, is explained by the Arab quack as a defluxion of rheums, failing to discharge through the upper orifices, progress downward, and settling in the muscles and joints, produce the affection. And might there not be more truth in that than the diagnosis of him who is a Membre de la Faculte ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... the operation with the utmost fortitude; but, to everyone's joy, it was found there was no necessity for it; she had been deceived by a villainous quack, who knew too well how to make a wound hideous and painful, and had continued her delusion for his ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... Faustus, the esteemed scholar, the skilful physician, gradually merged in the juggler, the quack, the adventurer, and the impostor. The popular legend follows him to foreign countries. His magic mantle carries him, in eight days, over the whole world, and even into the Infernal regions. He is honorably received at the Emperor's court at Innspruck, introduces himself invisibly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... introducing among the higher order of artists habits of nice and accurate workmanship in executing delicate pieces of machinery; and the same combination of mechanical powers which made the steel spider crawl, the duck quack, or waved the tiny rod of the magician, contributed in future years to purposes of higher import,—the wheels and pinions, which in these automata almost eluded the human senses by their minuteness, reappearing in modern times in the stupendous mechanism of ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... popped it out again in a few minutes, and came sailing with a saucy quack back again to the bank. "Do I look any the worse?" ...
— Dick and His Cat and Other Tales • Various

... man, I understand, this Grimshawe,—a quack, intemperate, always in these scuffles: let him ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... from our author respecting Mr. T. Sheridan's stripping of Bonduca—for we really think it worthy the son of that poet, who, neglecting his own genius and the duties of a regular practitioner, condescends to turn quack, and bedizen that high German doctor Pizarro, in ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter

... little religion—and not too much—leads to these unholy follies. There is a religious instinct in man. True religion satisfies it fully. Quack religion, pious tomfoolery, and doctrinal ineptitude foisted upon a God-hungry people end by driving some from one folly to another in a pitiful attempt to get away from the deceptions of man and near to God. Others are led on by ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton

... that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come. The world has outlived much, and will outlive a great deal more, and men have contrived to be happy in it. It has shown the strength of its constitution in nothing more than in surviving the quack medicines it has tried. In the scales of the destinies brawn will never weigh so much as brain. Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies, or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed by the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... to save the reputation of AEsculapius by giving him a prescription got from a quack to give ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... themselves on pyres, at Epsom Downs, after the Derby. We are not so fortunate in the demise of our Theosophists; and our police, less wise than the Hellenodicae, would probably not permit the Immolation of the Quack. Like your Alexander, they deal in marvels and miracles, oracles and warnings. All such bogy stories as those of your "Philopseudes," and the ghost of the lady who took to table- rapping because one of ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang

... of all that dupery and deception was the origin of it. Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's life on allegories; men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks. Let us try if, leaving out both the quack theory and the allegory one, and listening with affectionate attention to that far-off confused rumour of the Pagan ages, we cannot ascertain so much as this at least, That there was a kind of fact at the heart of them; that they too were not mendacious and distracted, but in ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... 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 ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day

... may be said to the discredit of this king, that the only reward he would grant the indefatigable Stowe, in his days of old age and want, was the royal permission to beg; but no one will blame him for neglecting such a quack as John Dee. He died in 1608, in the eighty-first year of his age, and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... for a very heinous piece of perjury, my earldom for not running away until the latter end of a certain battle, my marquisate for hoodwinking a half-senile Frenchman, and my dukedom for fetching in a quack doctor when he was sore needed by a lady whom the King at that ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... "That rascally quack would make my fortune were he to stay in Edinburgh," said the graduate; "this is the seventh nervous case I have heard of his making for me, and all by effect of terror." He next examined the composing draught which Lady Bothwell had unconsciously brought in her hand, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... after a long and weary day in court. His wife was buying, at an exorbitant price, a herb from a mendicant quack, which was said to ensure the birth of a child. A voice of greeting was heard in the courtyard. Anukul went out to see who was there. It was Raicharan. Anukul's heart was softened when he saw his old servant. He asked him many questions, ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore

... became insupportable, and they threw up their heads and bayed at the sun; women, mothers and virgins, shrilled shriek upon mounting shriek, and slapped their thighs as it might have been the roll of musketry. When they tried to draw breath, some half-strangled voice would quack out the word, and the riot began afresh. Last to fall was the city-trained Abdul. He held on to the edge of apoplexy, then collapsed, ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... a while after hearing this tale. At last he said: "I am not a doctor, I am not even what you call a quack doctor—I am a mere conjurer, and I gain my living by conjuring tricks and fortune-telling at the Exhibition which is going on in London. But although I am a poor man and an ignorant man, I have an inkling, a few sparks in me of ancient knowledge, and I know what is the ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring

... 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 ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... was soon thought not sufficient punishment, and they were left to swing, and slowly rot in chains, so this last was at length thought to be too lenient, and the convicts were condemned to be burned at the stake. Two negroes, named Quack and Cuffee, were the first doomed to this horrible death. The announcement of this sentence created the greatest excitement. It was a new thing to the colonists, this mode of torture being appropriated ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley

... they would, believe it: so should I (Like one of these penurious quack-salvers) But try experiments upon myself, Open the gates unto mine own disgrace, Lend bare-ribb'd envy opportunity To stab my reputation, and ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson

... 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 time longer, while I endeavour to show that ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan

... in womanly intuition, my dear, and for my part I had the same feeling as you. I mean that that man was not just what he appeared to be, namely, a chattering, ignorant quack." ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham

... 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

... of cheap advertising dentists and of quack doctors or ignorant nurses can carry these germs from one person to another. So can the razors and caustic stick of barbers ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss

... answered him by slapping himself on the stomach, the skin of which was so stretched by the fat that it resembled the skin of a drum. He would play him a tune on it, the glutton's vespers, with rolls and beats loud enough to have made a quack's fortune. Lorilleux, annoyed at not having any fat himself, said that it was soft and unhealthy. Coupeau ignored him and went on drinking more and more, saying it was for his ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... a quack," replied Culver. "He is a natural-born healer, and he uses only nature's remedies in his practice. Go and see him, Quincy, and judge ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin

... 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 ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... dozen times. It mattered the less, as it was a good one. Sir Charles capped it with a better. The Governor told a weird tale of Lunsford's men, the "babe-eating" regiment. Sir Charles recounted a little adventure of His Grace of Buckingham with a quack astrologer, a Court lady, and an orange girl, which made the ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston

... and air; at the same time rising and poising itself 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 could justify the slaughter of one of these innocents. I believe I ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder

... Ralegh, with their servants, King, and a Frenchman, Manourie, who is said to have brought Stukely his regular warrant. Manourie, who had been long settled in Devonshire, has been variously described as a physician and as a quack. Two centuries and a half ago the distinction between charlatans and experimentalists was not clearly marked in medical science. Ralegh seems to have suspected that he was a spy, but to have believed in his skill. The man may not have been ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing

... an innumerable swarm of begging friars, who fawned on the great, flattered the wealthy, and despoiled the poor. Another class traversed the country, selling pardons "come from Rome all hot," and extolling the virtues of their relics and the power of their indulgences with the eloquence of a quack vending his nostrums. Bishops held civil offices under the king, and priests acted as stewards in great men's houses. Simony possessed the Church, and the ministers of religion again sold ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various

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

... ill-temper expressing itself as naively as that of a child. Nor was its occasion a mystery to his sister. Numerous letters marked the recipient as an individual of consequence. Joel's mail was limited to communications from the distributors of quack remedies to whom he had communicated his symptoms in accordance with instructions set forth in their benevolently inquisitive advertisements. When Persis received several letters on the same mail, the possibility that he might be a person of secondary importance in the establishment ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith

... 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 you not ...
— Children's Classics In Dramatic Form • Augusta Stevenson

... imagine that they have something the matter, they are invariably the willing prey of quack doctors and every ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro

... the passenger with some spirit. "I see some o' Mis' Peak's cookin' to a farmers' supper once, when I was visitin' Susan Ellen's folks, an' I says 'Deliver me from sech pale-complected baked beans as them!' and she give a kind of a quack. She was settin' jest at my left hand, and couldn't help hearin' of me. I wouldn't have spoken if I had known, but she needn't have let on they was hers an' make everything unpleasant. 'I guess them beans ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett

... Christian teacher to a quack—"who promises to heal the sick, on condition that they keep from intelligent practitioners, ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English

... once more. I visited several patients on the list, and treated their several complaints in one invariable routine. Hitherto things had gone well, and no one, thank Heaven, had risen up in rebellion against my prescriptions. But let a physician's cures be as extraordinary as they will, some quack or other is always ready ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various

... beyond them; the old man, clearly, was a favorite of Fortune; Fan their master himself must deal with him. So they sent word ahead, and brought him to the palace of Fan. Who understood well the limitations of quack magic: if he was to be beaten at these tricks, where would his influence be? So he heaped up riches in the courtyard, and made a great fire all round.—"Anyone can have those things," he announced, "who will go in and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... tribes employed by the Hudson Bay Company in collecting furs, most of the words resemble in sound the objects they represent. For example, a wagon in Chinook is chick-chick, a clock is ding-ding, a crow is kaw-kaw, a duck, quack-quack, a laugh, tee-hee; the heart is tum-tum, and a talk or speech or sermon, wah-wah. The language was of English invention; it took its name from the Chinook tribes, and became common in the Northwest. Nearly all of the ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth

... amount of pains. A reader of his introduction who had never studied the text of his author might be forgiven if he should carry away the impression that Tourneur, as a serious or tragic poet, was little more than a better sort of Byron; a quack less impudent but not less transparent than the less inspired and more inflated ventriloquist of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage": whereas it is hardly too much to say that the earnest and fiery intensity of Tourneur's moral rhetoric is no less unmistakable than the blatant ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... realizing "happy results" with a "limited number of gentlemen," they should either remove the limitation themselves, or make known the secret to those who would be less sparing of the joys which it is capable of communicating. A quack who peddles a valuable remedy upon which he may have stumbled, and yet refuses to disclose its ingredients for the benefit of the whole medical fraternity, violates the esprit du corps of the profession, and is by ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various

... the less excuse for my blindness because I was at that very moment laying the foundations of my high fortune by the most ruthless disregard of all the quack duties which lead the peasant lad of fiction to the White House, and harness the real peasant boy to the plough until he is finally swept, as rubbish, into the workhouse. I was an ablebodied and ableminded young man in the ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... 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, "is the skull of Alexander the Great at the age of ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous

... believe not in magic; I ask not its aids, and I dread not its terrors. For the rest, I am confident of one mournful courage—the courage that comes from despair. I submit to your guidance, whatever it be, as a sufferer whom colleges doom to the grave submits to the quack who says, 'Take my specific and live!' My life is naught in itself; my life lives in another. You and I are both brave from despair; you would turn death from yourself—I would turn death from one I love more than myself. ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... 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, as if life were to last the measure ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown

... SCOTT says that the odds are that a quack will kill you quicker than a qualified doctor. All the same we prefer the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various

... man in your position going to an infernal quack like Professor Cyrus! Professor? Humph! ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston

... one of the sandwiches, was to transfer, if possible, the headache to the stomach, on the principle that the quack doctor cured a patient of paralysis by throwing him into fits, claiming that he was not much on paralysis, but he was hell on fits. The entrance of the piece of sandwich into the stomach—that is, the small pieces that we were able to blast ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck

... seen that honest face, that thick head of hair, and that identical cap, sticking out of the top of a portable wooden frame covered with placards, setting forth the virtues of quack medicines, the excellencies of dry goods, or the unequalled attractions of concert saloons. He also remembered that this wooden frame was much taller than any of the long procession of frames which followed it, and that, from ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... for example, in Caliban upon Setebos, the Grammarian's Funeral, My Last Duchess, and Mr. Sludge, the Medium. These are all psychological studies, in which the poet gets into the inner consciousness of a monster, a pedant, a criminal, and a quack, and gives their point of view. They are dramatic soliloquies; but the poet's self-identification with each of his creations, in turn, remains incomplete. His curious, analytic observation, his way of looking at the soul ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... being Clarencieux King-at-arms, He read the King this little tract I wrote Against tobacco." And the Mermaid roared With laughter. "Well, you went the way to hang All three of them," cried Lyly, "and, as for Ben, His Trinidado goes to bed with him." "Green gosling, quack no more," Selden replied, Smiling that rosy silken smile anew. "The King's a critic! When have critics known The poet from his creatures, God from me? How many cite Polonius to their sons And call it Shakespeare? Well, I took my text From sundry creatures ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... 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 ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs

... neighbor produces a small mortar and pestle and busies himself pounding drugs. For this operation he assumes a pair of large, round spectacles, that in the dimly lighted apartment and its nocturnal associations are highly suggestive of owls and owlish wisdom. The old quack works away at his mortar, regardless of the approach of daybreak, now and then pausing to adjust the wick in his little saucer of grease, or to indulge in ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... dogs at each side of his arm-chair, regarding him with watchful eyes and opened mouths, awaiting the expected morsel of ham or toast. Robert had a county paper on his knees, and made a feeble effort now and then to read the first page, which was filled with advertisements of farming stock, quack ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon

... 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, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... in de chicken coop, crowin' foh day; Horses in de stable goin' 'Nay, nay, nay;' Ducks in de yard goin' 'Quack, quack, quack!' Guineas in de tree tops, ...
— The Arkansaw Bear - A Tale of Fanciful Adventure • Albert Bigelow Paine

... difficulty: "When sparks cease to fly upwards," he said, "Comanches respect treaties, and wolves kill sheep no more, the oath of a Black Republican might be of some value as a protection to slave property." Jefferson Davis contemptuously stigmatized all the schemes of compromise as "quack nostrums," and he sneered justly enough at those who spun fine arguments of legal texture, and consumed time "discussing abstract questions, reading patchwork from the opinions of men now ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse

... think you're stuck up and 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

... carried a long, uncovered basket in which were arranged rows and piles of small bottles; a glance at the basket reassured her, every one knew Crazy Dale, the peddler of essences, cough-drops and quack medicines. ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin

... 23 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 ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse

... quack of the then world ... first time I had ever heard the lying scoundrel speak.... Demosthenes of blarney ... the big beggar-man who had L15,000 a year, and, proh pudor! the favour of English ministers instead of ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... signal from the Dominican a servant had brought in a pair of candelabra, and in their commonplace light the cabalistic hangings, the magician's appliances and his fantastically-dressed attendants looked as tawdry as the paraphernalia of a village quack. Heiligenstern alone survived the test. Erect, at bay as it were, his black robe falling in hieratic folds, the white wand raised in his hands, he might have personified the Prince of Darkness drawn up undaunted against the hosts ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... treatment. He sighs as you bid him farewell to return to advice which is so likely to prove fatal. The London physician, it is true, hints that though the oracle of the winter resort is a clever man he is also a quack. But a quack soars into a greatness beyond criticism when he creates cities and rules hundreds of patients ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green

... the depths of the waste-basket and handed to the general an eighteen by twenty-four sheet, poorly printed on cheap paper, with a "patent" inside, a number of advertisements of proprietary medicines, quack doctors, and fortune-tellers, and two or three columns of editorial and local news. Candor compels the admission that it was not an impressive sheet in any respect, except when regarded as the first local effort of a struggling people to make public expression of their life and aspirations. ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt

... said Mr Boffin, 'that on the celebrated day when I made what has since been agreed upon to be my grandest demonstration—I allude to Mew says the cat, Quack quack says the duck, and Bow-wow-wow says the dog—I assure you, my dear, that on that celebrated day, them flinty and unbelieving words hit my old lady so hard on my account, that I had to hold her, to prevent her running out after you, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... 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 machinery of ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... The quack doctor deserves to be kicked; found bottle of medicine on table somewhere; pure water; five shillings. He is coining money and fleecing people most scandalously; child now luckily in hospital; spoke strongly to ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.

... speak 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 against theirs, his fortune ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... acquaintance. He was clearly a confirmed hypochondriac, and I was dreamily conscious that he was pouring forth interminable trains of symptoms, and imploring information as to the composition and action of innumerable quack nostrums, some of which he bore about in a leather case in his pocket. I trust that he may not remember any of the answers which I gave him that night. Holmes declares that he overheard me caution him against the great danger of taking more than ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the 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 was ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg

... 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 ...
— The Foolish Dictionary • Gideon Wurdz

... queer old bird, with his whole wisdom of man packed up small for ready use, like a quack doctor," he said, as soon as ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes

... reredosses, and our heads did neuer ake.[83] For as the smoke in those daies was supposed to be a sufficient hardning for the timber of the house; so it was reputed a far better medicine to keepe the goodman and his familie from the quack or pose, wherewith as then verie few were oft acquainted." Harrison, i. 212, col. 1, ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various

... efficiency expert was regarded in England as an intruder and a quack; to use a stop watch on production was high crime and treason. To-day there are thousands of students of business science and factory management. In the spinning district girls in clogs sit alongside their foremen listening to lectures on how to save time and energy in work. Scores of old establishments ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson

... candle burning down almost to 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. At supper, which consisted of bread, butter, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... why they were thus isolating my brother from all of us. I heard steps go upstairs, not only of the Dominican quack doctor, but of the Abbe Montagu, who had been previously sent to convert us. The good old Bonchamp, who had a conscience, was away at St. Germain with Gaspard de Nidemerle, and I—I had no one to appeal to when I knew they were harassing ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... children this they were much amused, and I am sure they thought it would be very dull never to hear the crowing of a cock or the "quack, quack" of a duck—to say nothing of the soft cooing of doves in the wood, and the sweet, rich notes of the thrushes ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham

... cannot boast of a millionaire pill-maker like the late Professor Holloway, we have not often been without a local well-to-do "quack." A medical man, named Richard Aston, about 1815-25, was universally called so, and if the making of money is proof of quackery, he deserved the title, as he left a fortune of L60,000. He also left an only daughter, but she and her husband were left to ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... the Quack comes to visit the Patient, he examines him very carefully; If the Evil Spirit be here, says he, we shall quickly dislodge him. This said, he withdraws by himself to a little Tent made on purpose, where he dances, and sings houling like an Owl; (which gives the Jesuits Occasion to say, ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various

... here no concern with Warburton's character as a polemical theologist; this has been the business of that polished and elegant scholar, Bishop Lowth, who has shown what it is to be in Hebrew literature "a Quack in Commentatorship, and a Mountebank in Criticism." He has fully entered into all the absurdity of Warburton's "ill-starred Dissertation on Job." It is curious to observe that Warburton in the wild chase of originality, often too boldly took the bull by the horns, for he ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... great?" he cried. "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 live in such a nice house. I almost feel I know him. I'll try his Cure.' ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... or stealings, on bits of pasteboard that admit them to their nightly banquet. The stage struck always copy the traits of the leading actor of the hour, whoever he may be, and grunt and bluster in imitation of "Ned"—meaning Forrest—or quack and stutter a la "Bill"—that is, Macready—as the wind of popular favor veers and changes. It is curious, at a representation of the "Gladiator," to winnow these young gentlemen from the mass by the lens of an ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage

... lasting till well into the first entree, but interspersed with remarks such as, "Tom's bad again; I can't tell what's the matter with him!" "I suppose Ann doesn't come down in the mornings?"—"What's the name of your doctor, Fanny?" "Stubbs?" "He's a quack!"—"Winifred? She's got too many children. Four, isn't it? She's as thin as a lath!"—"What d'you give for this sherry, Swithin? Too ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... 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

... went round and round, And crashed through the window-pane, And the scared Tin Monkey made a bound For the little red Railroad Train. The painted Duck went "Quack! quack! quack!" But the Railroad Train just whistled back! Till the Elephant saw what the racket meant And packed his trunk and—away ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various

... lambe them!" a cant phrase of the time derived from the fate of Dr. Lambe, an astrologer and quack, who was knocked on the head by the rabble ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... the vocational types it has produced. Among the types which it would be interesting to study are: the shopgirl, the policeman, the peddler, the cabman, the night watchman, the clairvoyant, the vaudeville performer, the quack doctor, the bartender, the ward boss, the strike-breaker, the labor agitator, the school teacher, the reporter, the stockbroker, the pawnbroker; all of these are characteristic products of the conditions of city life; each with its special experience, insight, and ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... 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 kept "The Astrologer's Feast;" ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... similarity of voice in families is still more marked. We need only recall the harsh and noisy parrots, so similar in their peculiar utterance. Or, take as an example the web-footed family: Do not all the geese and the innumerable host of ducks quack? Does not every member of the crow family caw, whether it be the jackdaw, the jay, or the magpie, the rook in some green rookery of the Old World, or the crow of our woods, with its long, melancholy caw that seems to make the silence and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... neat, All pride and business, bustle and conceit; With looks unaltered by these scenes of woe, With speed that, entering, speaks his haste to go, He bids the gazing throng around him fly, And carries fate and physic in his eye: A potent quack, long versed in human ills, Who first insults the victim whom he kills; Whose murderous hand a drowsy Bench protect, And whose most tender mercy is neglect. Paid by the parish for attendance here, He wears contempt upon his sapient sneer; In haste he seeks the bed where Misery ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... Sculpin, "the diet suggested by that quack, Porpoise, passed out of the books years ago. Give the child toast on sea-foam, if you wish to ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field

... condition. This it will do; and those who blame it for not doing more blame it for not doing what no Constitution, no code of laws, ever did or ever will do; what no legislator, who was not an ignorant and unprincipled quack, ever ventured ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... exordium 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 old gentleman's ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol

... 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

... time; and he had been already bled so much, and so often, that he could bear it no longer. The unfortunate patient, shocked at this declaration, replies, "Sir, you have always pretended to be a regular doctor; but now I find you are an arrant quack. I had an excellent constitution when I first fell into your hands, but you have quite destroyed it; and now I find I have no other chance for saving my life, but by calling for the help of some regular physician." In the debate, the members ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett



Words linked to "Quack" :   let loose, mountebank, unqualified, quackery, md, medicine, quack-quack, quack grass, doc, act, Dr., charlatan, behave, let out, medico, practice of medicine, utter, do, sound, physician, doctor, emit



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com