Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera & Books (review)

It is a word that has incited concern, bewilderment, anger, and impulsive reactions over the last four hundred years. . . Quack. This handsome hardbound catalog accompanied an exhibition that William Helfand curated at New York City's Grolier Club. Helfand's illustrative treatment of quackery sets the visual bar at a lofty height, while encouraging future scholarly study of this enigmatic subject.

Helfand, who often writes on the history of pharmacy, begins with an eloquent introduction that succinctly explores the meaning and existence of quackery and its purveyors. "Quack is a pejorative term, disparagingly, albeit sometimes defensively, applied by a member of the establishment, the orthodox, regular, professional, credentialed and accepted class to describe the unorthodox, unlicensed, disapproved member of a fringe or irregular group. . . . Above all, the term has become associated with the sellers of medicines and the marketers of medical systems" (13).

Helfand suggests that it was often hard to distinguish among quacks, irregulars, and even regulars. In the vernacular, irregulars were identified as unorthodox practitioners, homeopaths, hydropaths, Thomsonians, botanics, eclectics, and the like. Regulars were also called allopaths, medical doctors, or orthodox practitioners. He describes the differences in training, licensing, and stability among the three groups and suggests that the lack of etiologic, diagnostic, and therapeutic answers provided by regular medicine offered a fertile environment for quacks and irregulars. Of particular note is his observation that quacks often came into town, then quickly left before a therapeutic relationship could be cultivated with a patient—or before buyers could ascertain that they had been duped. More familiar themes—like the adoption of print advertising, success in side shows, bastardization of current "scientific" realities, and ease in winning public embrace of their guarantees—are also covered.

While setting an appropriate textual stage, Helfand's book shows its real power in its images. The bulk of the catalog consists of wonderful reproductions, most in black and white, of promotional broadsides, engravings, lithographs, newspapers advertisements, and political cartoons depicting quacks or their products. The images are divided into ten themes, from "The Ways of the Quack" to "Anatomical Museums & Medicine Shows." Some evocative standard images like those from the print maker Hogarth and the lithographer Daumier are included. Sections are devoted to Vin Mariani, Morison's Pills, Sex Cures and Addiction and Electricity Cures, which will be topics recognizable to readers who have followed the work of Ann Anderson, Gerald Carlson, and James Harvey Young.

There is a troublesome section called "Systems," which lumps homeopaths and Thomsonians together with Blue Glass Therapy, mesmerism, and William Radam's Microbe Killer. While there may have been irregulars who were just as unscrupulous or entrepreneurial as the opportunistic quack, the lack of differentiation here is shortsighted and ignores recent scholarship in the historiography of alternative and/or fraudulent practice in medicine. In his introduction, Helfand does consider that there might be a separation between the unscrupulous health entrepreneur and the irregular who may have truly believed in regimens that were less caustic or toxic than the heroic, chemical-based practices of the day—but without convincing records it is difficult to prove such motivation.

Highlighting Helfand's rich collection are less familiar asides, as in a section on "Quacks in the Arts", which includes the delightful color engraving of Dulcamara in the opera, The Elixir of Love, and in the section on the "Marketplace and the Itinerant Quack", where we find handbills that were customized by the seller before visiting individual towns. From the slightly comic, to the grotesque, from the laughable to the unsettling, each one of these ads or prints might encourage a future line of social or cultural inquiry. Helfand's individual descriptions of the images include nods to the political, social, cultural, economic realities of the times.

The final section, "The Evils of Quackery," introduces early twentieth-century attempts to curtail some of the most dangerous of the patent medicines...