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

The title of this exhibition, the fourth in a series dedicated to topics in the history of medicine at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), derives from a comment that Benjamin Franklin penciled in his copy of the 1784 report on mesmerism issued by the Faculty of Medicine in France. Franklin was commenting not on mesmerism per se, but rather on the Faculty of Medicine's coat of arms, which features at its center three ducks with sprigs of leaves in their beaks: "It is remarkable," he wrote, "that the Arms of the Faculty . . . should be three ducks, with herbs in their mouths to prevent their pronouncing the motto, Quack, Quack, Quack."

Like the story of Franklin's comment, this exhibition demands a certain level of attention to detail. It comes at quackery from two directions: first, through materials produced by the sellers of nostrums themselves; and second, through satirical prints that score their points by representing the quack as a huckster, cheat, and greedy scoundrel.

As noted by curators William Helfand, a medical ephemera collector and scholar, and John Ittmann, the PMA curator of prints, quackery is often in the eye of the beholder. To figure out what quackery means in a given time and place requires a fair amount of mental acrobatics. Quack, Quack, Quack gathers 146 together materials from several different countries with different regulatory approaches to pharmaceutical sales, and ranges in time period from the early 1600s to the 1920s. This array of images provides a splendid overview of the rapturous, often grandiose, promises of health and beauty made by quack practitioners, as well as of the ways in which the figure of the quack has been used as a rhetorical and visual trope by critics.

But just who should be considered a quack remains tantalizingly elusive. Helfand and Ittmann try to identify quacks by their shared characteristics: they tended to travel, for instance, hitting the road before aggrieved customers could demand recompense—but "legitimate" healers also worked circuits. Other defining characteristics highlighted by the exhibition and its excellent accompanying catalog include quacks' use of the trappings of legitimacy (such as diplomas, affidavits, and testimonials) to create an aura of respectability, and their exaggerated claims for the curative power of their medicines or system; these traits, however, were also shared by regular physicians, who of course needed to compete with quacks to attract patients. (The passage of laws like England's 1858 Medical Registration Act and the United States' 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act did provide some lines of demarcation: physicians and sellers of nostrums were held to legally enforceable standards about what they could promise.)

Setting aside this issue of defining what sort of healer deserved to be labeled a "quack," the exhibition raises another tantalizing question: what sort of image deserves to be labeled "art"? Only a few of the images displayed here would meet the expectations of the typical art museum visitor. The boldly drawn and vividly colored advertisements for various nostrums, potions, and medical wares are the most visually compelling and artful images in the show. The robust colors and clean lines of an 1899 Italian advertisement for a belt that allegedly prevented seasickness, for example, convey the assurance and steadiness that the belt probably did not, while another broadside's depiction of a shockingly emaciated and mottled woman—shown post-treatment, in her "cured" state—makes a little prayer of thankfulness for modern medicine spring to one's lips (see catalog #21).

The satirical prints, on the other hand, coexist uneasily—both visually and intellectually—with the advertisements. The smaller and more detailed satirical prints challenged me, and seemed to challenge other visitors, too. One couple wandered in and out of the spacious gallery in less than thirty...