Quack-Quack-Quack: Donald Duck Dissents

QUACK-QJUACK-QUACK: DONALD DUCK DISSENTS JOHN L. DUSSEAU* Step right up—here you are! You may not have Cinderella but ifyou haven't it's a cinch you've got something eke and no matter what it is this little box will save your life one dose alone irrevocably guaranteed to instantaneously eliminate permanently prevent and otherwise completely cure toothache sleeplessness clubfeet mumps stuttering varicoseveins youthful errors tonsilitis rheumatism lockjaw pyorrhea stomachache hernia tuberculosis nervous debility impotence halitosis andfalling down stairs or your money back. [e. e. cummings, Him (I)] In every society there is psychic need for an identifiable enemy, within or without its gates. In the society of medicine that enemy has long been recognized as the quack. But, as in the instance of every officially recognized antagonist, there is a vehemence in the attack on quackery out of proportion to harm done. It must be considered that quackery can be harmful only when nonquackery has something useful to offer. Since most diseases are self-limiting and, of the balance, few are subject to genuine cure, the practice of quackery may not be quite so vicious as it has long been held to be. The literature of quackery is immense, and much of it a battle waged on uncertain legal grounds. Were but a tenth of this attention given to the shortcomings, failings, and occasional dishonesties of medicine practiced within its authorized ranks, there would perhaps be less opportunity for frauds and faddists to feather their nests by deceit. Because of its polemical character the official antiquackery campaign scarcely ever attempts definition of the very ill it seeks to expunge from society. In one of the innumerable libel suits instituted by the infamous John Romulus Brinkley ("the goat-gland doctor"), Judge R.J. McMillan, in a somewhat unusual charge to thejury, said: "A common definition of the word quack is to make vain and loud pretensions, especially of medBased in part on the author's earlier essay "Dr. Donald Duck: The Quack in Practice," published in The Pharos of Alpha Omega Alpha. © 1977. By permission from The Pharos, vol. 40, no. 3. *Address: 609 Fox Fields Road, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 19010.© 1987 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 003 1 -5982/87/3003-0562$0 1 .00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 30, 3 ¦ Spring 1987 \ 345 ical ability; to boast, to vaunt aloud or be a boastful pretender to medical skill or to make extravagant claims for a cure-all; to advertise with fraudulent boasts" [2]. Hugh Hussey, in an address on quackery, approvingly quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes as saying: "[Quackery] is invariably connected with some lucrative practical application. Its possessors and practitioners are usually shrewd people; they are very serious with the public, but wink and laugh a good deal among themselves. The believing multitude consists ofwomen ofboth sexes, feeble-minded inquirers, poetical optimists, people who always get cheated in buying horses, philanthropists who insist on hurrying up the millennium, and others of this class, with here and there a clergyman, less frequently a lawyer, very rarely a physician, and almost never a horse jockey or a member of the detective force" [3]. A strange perversity appears in this statement, for it is the victims of quackery who bear its onus. They are bitingly characterized as wistful, ignorant, and foolish, and a certain sly admiration is apparent for the very perpetrators of their deception. One can envision from the rolling phrases of its finale an hierarchical society headed by a group of avatars including a detective, a jockey, Autocrat Holmes, and Dr. Hussey. Whether or not a cleric would make the elite group of managers hangs obscurely in the balance. A modern lexicographic source will of course yield a more objective definition of the quack: "a fraudulent or ignorant pretender to medical skill" [4]. Yet even this can scarcely be called a definition without bias, for the quack need no more be ignorant than he need be a man, although he is usually assumed to be both. Several famous quacks have been persons of genuine, if misapplied, erudition. Perhaps William Read—the tailor become ophthalmologist and knighted by Queen Anne for his services...