Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle

Conclusion: The In-Laws: Orthodoxy and Quackery in Vernon Galbray

147 Conclusion The In-Laws Orthodoxy and Quackery in Vernon Galbray Quack politicians, quack divines, quack lawyers, and quack players, Quack ladies too, whose varnish’d charms are giddy youth’s betrayers; There’s quack philanthropy, quack love, quack friendship, and quack trade, sirs, In short—except my customers—the world’s in masquerade, sirs. —Jack Ketch (the hangman) in John Corry, “Quack Doctors Dissected,” 1805. The anonymous novel Vernon Galbray; or, The Empiric: The History of a Quack Dentist (1875) describes the career of Samuel Moses, a part-English, part-Dutch, Jewish dentist from Rotterdam . Moses changes his name to Vernon Galbray and moves to England because of the “gullibility, the ease with which money could be made there, and how readily they were imposed upon by a specious address or a plausible announcement.”1 Under his new name, Galbray establishes a dental practice (complete with a sign claiming the practice is forty years old) and buys silver plate and London suits. He then advertises heavily, dwelling on the dangers of poor dentistry and unqualified practitioners. Of course, Galbray is himself unskilled, and his abused assistant, Spyk, crafts the very dentures that Galbray can barely put in. His advertisements are written by an alcoholic Englishman who later becomes another so-called assistant. In this manner, Galbray quickly becomes a 148 R Doctoring the Novel wealthy, socially prominent, middle-class, English professional. Aside from his workplace shenanigans, Vernon Galbray and his beleaguered wife neglect their lovely daughter, Adele. But Galbray fatally overreaches when he takes on an apprentice, Rivington, for an exorbitant fee. The son of a vicar, Rivington diligently studies dentistry (guided by Spyk), befriends Spyk, converts Adele to Anglicanism, and proposes to her after her mother runs away with another man and Galbray loses his practice in a fire, a fact that concerns Galbray far more than the death of Spyk in the fire. In the end, a trustworthy Anglo-Jewish lawyer helps Rivington unmask Galbray and drive him out of business. The author of Vernon Galbray begins with seemingly clear boundaries between orthodoxy and quackery. The novel’s double subtitle makes it doubly plain that this is the history of a quack dentist who is an empiric. As we have seen in earlier chapters, quackery is often described according to behaviors such as empiricism, itinerancy, advertising, self-promotion, and trickery and qualities such as greed, foreignness, lack of skill, and lack of faith (Galbray is both Dutch and Jewish). By embodying many of these qualities and behaviors in Galbray, the author encourages readers to view quackery as an external force that can be recognized and eliminated. Like Mrs. Sweeney’s Indian shawl in Villette or Cullingworth’s posh dining room in The Stark Munro Letters, Galbray’s London suits, plate, and premises allow him to mask his blatant self-promotion, incompetence , foreignness, immorality, and greed, but in the end, he is identified , categorized, and eliminated. Just as Galbray appears to embody quackery, so too does Rivington appear to embody dental orthodoxy through his competence, manners, Anglicanism, and Englishness. In this desire for clear boundaries between orthodoxy and quackery and for essentialized hallmarks of each, the author of Vernon Galbray resembles several of the writers, legislators, physicians, and others cited throughout this book who imagined an end to quackery through professional and legal maneuverings. Indeed, the novel’s publication coincided with the beginning of a campaign by the Dental Reform Committee, later the British Dental Association, to professionalize dentistry. In the same way that Rivington joins with a lawyer to cast out Galbray, dentists of the 1870s appealed to legislators to stem the perceived tide of malpractice as dentistry expanded to include rising numbers of practitioners.2 Founded in 1880, the British Dental Association apparently devoted much of its energy to prosecuting unqualified dentists. This is not to say that the development of professional standards is unnecessary for both 149 R Conclusion practitioner security and public safety; rather, Vernon Galbray presents an oversimplified view of legal and professional reform as a relatively easy and effective remedy for quackery in which quackery originates in an unqualified, immoral outsider who can be identified by given hallmarks and cast out. In fact, as with Rochester’s Italian cordial in Jane Eyre, the apparently clear boundaries between orthodoxy and quackery are difficult to maintain, even in this most polemical of novels. What about Spyk? The secondary subtitle of the novel...