Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Quack   Listen
verb
Quack  v. i.  (past & past part. qvacked; pres. part. quacking)  
1.
To utter a sound like the cry of a duck.
2.
To make vain and loud pretensions; to boast. " To quack of universal cures."
3.
To act the part of a quack, or pretender.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Quack" Quotes from Famous Books



... day the 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

... come 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 life, is to ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... 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 ...
— The Wise Mamma Goose • Charlotte B. Herr

... functionless shareholder. He may be a heavy-eyed sensualist, a small-minded leader of fashion, a rival to his servants in the gay science of etiquette, a frequenter of race-courses and music-halls, a literary or scientific quack, a devotee, an amateur anything—the point is that his income and sustenance have no relation whatever to his activities. If he fancies it, or is urged to it by those who have influence over him, he may even "be a king!" But that is not compulsory, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... not if support were given only to other ways. A man may make a round sum at a rowing match which cripples his strength for life; or by leaping across Passaic Falls, till he breaks his neck; he may set up for a wizard or a conjuror or a quack doctor,—he may pick your pocket or fire your house,—all in the way of business. The only question is in which way will you help him on. Things must be judged of quite apart from their money-making results. The old African maker of "greegrees" (charms) burns ...
— Tired Church Members • Anne Warner

... with a grey beard and liquid eyes, absorbed in studies of the obsolete kind, a doctor of theology, law, medicine and astronomy. We spent three days in arguing and questioning; I consented to swallow a potion or two which he made up before me, of very innocent materials. My friend is neither a quack nor superstitious, and two hundred years ago would have been a better physician than most in Europe. Indeed I would rather swallow his physic now than that of many a M.D. I found him like all the learned theologians I have known, extremely liberal and tolerant. You can conceive nothing more interesting ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... high disdain; "as if I'd put myself again under that quack's thumb. No, sir!" and snapping his fingers derisively at Ben, he straightened up jauntily on his somewhat uncertain feet. "All I want is a little air," stumbling off to ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney

... gazed at him in mute surprise; then hurried, with every variety of squeak, and quack, and fluttering wing, from his ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne

... family; bright prospects lie before her; her parents' lives and happiness are wrapped up in that girl. But in an evil hour she has been led astray. Now she is with child. She begs, she implores you to save her from ruin, and her parents from despair. If you do not help her, some other Doctor or a quack will do it; but you could do it so much better. If you should have yielded on the two former occasions, if you have already stained your heart with innocent blood, will you now refuse? Where are you going to ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens

... were clerks and bookkeepers resident in the city, or traveling machinery experts who went about installing small power-plants. They gossiped with Una about the husbands of the declasse women—men suspected to be itinerant quack doctors, sellers of dubious mining or motor stock, or even ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... cold. The black wasps are far hardier. With their passing goes that tiny shrill uproar of the pasture and in the amber quiet of sunset the place becomes a vast whispering gallery. Tiny sounds seem to be entangled here and made audible from very far. The quack of incoming ducks a mile away across the pond sounds as if on the nearer shore. The laughter of children comes as far, nor can you readily locate the direction. At such times the mystical quality of the place deepens with the peace of it. I notice then, as I did not notice in midday, the fairy ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

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

... second hand, being in the North, as you may remember. Grafton came in from Kent and invested Marlboro' Street. He himself broke the news to Mr. Carvel, who took to his bed. Leiden was not in attendance, you may be sure, but that quack-doctor Drake. Swain sent me a message, and I killed a horse getting here from New York. But I could no more gain admittance to your grandfather, Richard, than to King George the Third. I was met in the hall by that crocodile, who told me with too many fair words that I could not see my ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... towards the charitable institutions of the French metropolis. There are very many notabilities of the French Imperial Court, who were then fermiers des jeux, or gambling house contractors; and only a year or two since Doctor Louis Veron, ex-dealer in quack medicines, ex-manager of the Grand Opera, and ex-proprietor of the "Constitutionnel" newspaper, offered an enormous royalty to Government for the privilege of establishing a gambling house in Paris. But the Emperor Napoleon—all ex-member of Crockford's as he is—sensibly declined the ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... is at once a eulogy on the man, and a bold advertisement of the medicine. Lockyer died on 26th April, 1672. An air of sanctimonious benevolence will be noticed on the face of the recumbent doctor—probably a faithful portrait—not unlike the expression given to the quack doctor in one of Hogarth's famous pictures. The face of the cherub above wears a look of intense agony, which frivolous people are wont to attribute to the panacea. Higher up on the same wall there is a Hatchment, with the armorial bearings of the person to whom it refers, and ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley

... justified by the Bible and that it conformed to the opinions of that great mass of the American people who believe that fresh air is the devil, we should promptly lock up that doctor as a dangerous quack. When the negroes of Kansas were said to be taking pink pills to guard themselves against Halley's Comet, they were doing something which appeared to them as eminently practical and entirely reasonable. Not long ago we read of the savage way ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... them from expecting only praise—slab, lavish, and slavish—from the stranger within their gates. But they do not. If he holds his peace, they forge tributes to their own excellence which they put into his mouth, thereby treating their own land which they profess to honour as a quack treats his pills. If he speaks—but you shall see for yourselves what happens then. And they cannot see that by untruth and invective it is themselves alone that ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... got it tried to any extent in the civil province of things, his head by much victory grew light, (no head can stand more than its quantity,) and he lost head, as they say, and became a selfish ambitionist and quack, and was hurled out, leaving his idea to be realized, in the civil province of things, by others! Thus was Napoleon; thus are all great men: children of the idea; or, in Ram-Dass' phraseology, furnished with fire to burn up ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... since those days," Rochester declared. "You have acquired the knack of glib speech. You have become a past master in the arts which go to the ensnaring of over-imaginative women. You have mixed with quack spiritualists and self-styled professors of what they term occultism. Go and practise your arts where you will, but remember what I have told you. Remember the person's name which I have mentioned. Remember it, obey what I have said, and you may fool the whole world. ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... bitter and relentless warfare with the clerical authorities of Catholic and Protestant lands, the anatomists and physiologists had at last obtained permission to dissect bodies and to substitute a positive knowledge of our organs and their habits for the guesswork of the mediaeval quack. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... 'Proteus Hill:' Sir John Hill, a celebrated character of that day, of incredible industry and versatility, a botanist, apothecary, translator, actor, dramatic author, natural historian, multitudinous compiler, libeller, and, intus et in cute, a quack and coxcomb. See Boswell's account of the interview between the King and Dr Johnson, for a somewhat modified estimate ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... of the superior order, and to 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

... starving in garrets, Shakespeares in the workhouse, while dull modern productions are applauded on the silly English stage, and poetasters are crowned by the Academies; but believe me that in Archaeology, in the deciphering of manuscripts, the quack is detected immediately. The science has been carried to such a state of perfection that, if our knowledge is still unhappily imperfect, our materials inadequate, the public recognition of our services quite out of proportion to our ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross

... a traitor to the Constitution and a secret agent of the Wilhelmstrasse. And thus there were American pathologists and bacteriologists who denounced Prof. Dr. Paul Ehrlich as little better than a quack hired by the Krupps to poison Americans, and who displayed their pious horror of the late Prof. Dr. Robert Koch by omitting all acknowledgment of obligation to him from their monographs. And finally there was the posse of "two thousand American Historians" assembled by Mr. Creel to instruct the ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan

... with borage I obtained a syrup which was a sovran remedy for whooping-cough; I distilled camomile; I extracted the essential oil from the wintergreen. In short, botany had won for me the reputation of a quack doctor. ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... the only quack doctor extant who greedily swallows his own medicine and foolishly imagines that it does ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... division of labor as a discipline may therefore be best studied in 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 point of view ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... not in the streets of Askalon I Two thousand years after the time of Aristotle, we see a prevailing school working directly back to the condition of affairs which existed in the Athenian agora under the disapproving eyes of the father of political philosophy. Panaceas, universal cure-alls, and quack remedies—the Initiative, the Referendum, and the Recall are paraded as if these—nostrums of the mountebanks of the county fair—would surely remedy the perplexing ills of new and hitherto unheard-of social, economical, and political ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams

... that the poor girl was attacked by a disorder in her right hand, which ate into the two bones belonging to the little finger and the next. [1] Owing to her father's carelessness, she had been treated by an ignorant quack-doctor, who predicted that the poor child would be crippled in the whole of her right arm, if even nothing worse should happen. When I noticed the dismay of her father, I begged him not to believe all that this ignorant doctor had said. He replied that he had no acquaintance with ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini

... accept the invitations. It takes my two secretaries half their time to wade through my correspondence and to decide which of it is to be pitched into the waste-paper basket. I am not a dealer in quack remedies, or an actor. I ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... the usual collection of small oddments: bits of cloth, quack medicines, cheap fairings, a clothful of atta—greyish, rough-ground native flour—twists of down-country tobacco, tawdry pipe-stems, and a packet of curry-stuff, all wrapped in a quilt. Kim turned it over with the air of a wise ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling

... of the two sermons[120] to the bookseller Colburn for L250—well sold, I think—and is to go forth immediately. The man is a puffing quack; but though I would rather the thing had not gone there, and far rather that it had gone nowhere, yet, hang it! if it makes the poor lad easy, what needs I fret about it? After all, there would be little gain ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... entered into conversation with me while I took some refreshment, and, finding I had read a little, became very obliging and friendly. Our acquaintance continued all the rest of his life. He had been, I imagine, an ambulatory quack doctor, for there was no town in England, nor any country in Europe, of which he could not give a very particular account. He had some letters, and was ingenious, but he was an infidel, and wickedly undertook, some years after, to turn the ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... humanity the poison-taint of their protean vileness? Do you know that in your schools one-quarter of the children are already purblind? Have you gauged the importance of your tremendous consumption of quack catholicons, of the fortunes derived from their sale, of the spread of modern nervous disorders, of toothless youth and thrice loathsome age among the helot-classes? Do you know that in the course of my late journey to London, I walked from Piccadilly Circus to Hyde Park Corner, during which ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel

... deal 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

... quack, quack!" came from out of the reeds, and a brown duck came sailing out, followed by ten little yellow balls of down with flat beaks, swimming like their mother, but in a hurried pop-and-go-one fashion, in and out, and round and round, and seeming ...
— Young Robin Hood • G. Manville Fenn

... 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 ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various

... teacher know where the pupil is failing, but also the cause of his failure. Only when we know this can we intelligently apply the remedy for the failure. A physician friend of mine tells me that almost any quack can prescribe successfully for sickness if he has an expert at hand to diagnose the case and tell him what is the matter. This is the hardest part of a physician's work and requires the most skill. So it is with the teacher's work as well. If we are sure that a certain boy is failing ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts

... some extensive alterations in the old house, and became a cripple and a valetudinarian for life. But still Vavasour, always of a sanguine temperament, cherished a hope that surgical assistance might restore him: from place to place, from professor to professor, from quack to quack, he carried the unhappy boy, and as each remedy failed he was only the more impatient to devise a new one. But as it was the mind as well as person of his son in which the father had stored up his ambition; so, in despite of this fearful accident and ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... personal or rather personifying element in faith extends even to the lowest forms of it, for it is this that produces faith in pseudo-revelation, in inspiration, in miracle. There is a story of a Parisian doctor, who, when he found that a quack-healer was drawing away his clientele, removed to a quarter of the city as distant as possible from his former abode, where he was totally unknown, and here he gave himself out as a quack-healer and conducted himself as such. When he was denounced as an illegal practitioner he produced ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... five feet deep, lies on his back, A cobbler, starmonger, and quack, Who, to the stars in pure gold will, Does to his best look upward still, Weep all you customers that use His pills, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... I soon made up my mind to yield to the impulse and go abroad. My intention was to avoid cities, and, wandering from village to village, lay my soul bare to the healing influences of nature. As to any healing in the power of Time, I despised the old bald-pate as a quack who performed his seeming cures at the expense of the whole body. The better cures attributed to him are not his at all, but produced by the operative causes whose servant he is. A thousand holy balms require his services for their full action, but they, and not he, are ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald

... running before the wind and soon were near enough to get a good view. It was a bird of some kind. We were in no doubt about the kind when it raised itself upon the water, flapped its wings and uttered a loud "Quack! qu-a-a-a-ck!" ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson

... 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 ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... black heads and burnished wings, others with green and blue bodies. A fine region this for frogs, but many of them live in trees, finding, I suppose, that they are likely to be gobbled up, if they keep, as frogs in northern countries do, in the water. As night drew on, we heard them 'hoo-hooing, quack-quacking,' keeping up the strangest concert imaginable; indeed, had not the consul assured me that frogs produced the noises, I should have supposed that they were caused by some species of nightbird; however, I am, I confess, no great hand at description, nor had we a naturalist on board, ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston

... heat is intolerable, the door-keepers let the people keep shuffling in, the ducks in the corner are going quack, quack, quack, here's a little girl being tried for her life, and the judge can't hear a word that's said. Bring me my black cap, and I'll condemn ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... came downstairs and I was impelled to slip behind the door and alarm her by some wild cry as she entered, I was able to stifle the impulse and to greet her with dignity and restraint. An overpowering desire to quack like a duck was met and ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle

... numerous other valiant and great warriors—left no posterity behind them; or has the presumption of General von Mack imposed upon the judgment of the Counsellors of his Prince? This latter must have been the case; how otherwise could the welfare of their Sovereign have been entrusted to a military quack, whose want of energy and bad disposition had, in 1799, delivered up the capital of another Sovereign to his enemies. How many reputations are gained by an impudent assurance, and lost when the man of talents is called upon to act and the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith

... Queen Elizabeth. This is a statement which is true, but needs explanation. It is not the case that there was no acting. On the contrary, there has always been acting of some kind or other. There was acting at the fairs, where the Cheap Jack and the Quack had their tumbling boys and clowns to attract the crowd. There were always minstrels and tumblers, men and women who played, sang, danced, and tumbled in the hall for the amusement of the great people in the long winter evenings. Not including ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant

... backwards and forwards with that steady sense of promenading which the Spaniard understands above all other men. The dealers in coloured handkerchiefs from Barcelona or mantillas from Seville were driving a great trade, and the majority of them had long since shouted themselves hoarse. A few quack dentists were operating upon their victims under the friendly covert of a big drum and a bassoon. Dealers in wonderful drugs and herbs were haranguing the crowd, easily gaining the attention of the simple peasants by handling ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman

... having 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 ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... by the 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 ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge

... Michel Angelo, who resembled equally a Marseillais hair-dresser and the Hercules at a country fair, a masseur, pedicurist, manicurist and something of a dentist, rested both elbows on the table with the assurance of a quack whom one receives in the morning and who knows the petty weaknesses, the private miseries of the house in which he happens to be. M. Bompain completed that procession of subalterns, all classified with reference to some one specialty. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... little ducklings were very, very ill, Their mother sent for Dr. Quack, who gave them each a pill, But soon as they recovered, the first thing that they did Was to peck the Ancient Gander, till he ran ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards

... the owl and make a fair "hoot," otherwise keeping still, he may attract many birds that will feel bound to settle the question of his identity. A young friend of mine, by a good imitation of a blue jay's quack, finds many little woods' folks peering at him from the trees which he might not otherwise see. The "smack" which is produced by violently kissing the back of the closed fingers will call many birds from their hiding places, especially during the nesting season. The ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock

... one quack nostrums, pomade divine, like James's powder, has obtained a reputation far above the most sanguine expectations of its concoctors. This article strictly belongs to the druggist, being sold as a remedial agent; nevertheless, ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse

... thoroughly immoral than is M. Renan on this matter. This Jesus of his, about whom he sentimentalizes, whom he declares a thousand times to be so 'charming,' and so 'divine,' and the rest, turns out to be a deliberate cheat and quack, putting out claims He does not Himself believe, and acting in sham miracles which people coax Him, according to his biographer, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... said, "Mr Panton's coming right again, fast. Nice healthy appearance about his wound, and Mr Lane's, too. When the sea fails to get me a living I think I shall set up as quack doctor. Come, gentlemen, you are getting better, you know. Not long ago you were on your backs; then you managed to sit on deck; then to stand for a bit, and now you have been here for ever so long watching us. That don't look as ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn

... was drownded, sure enough," spoke a woman's shrill voice, high above the cackle of the hens and the quack-quack of the ducks—"drownded dead, an' more's the pity; an' their ma dead, too, an' their pa in Africa, an' their aunties takin' on terrible ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur

... wrought up against Doctor West. Moreover, Katherine despised Bruce as a powerful, ruthless, demagogic hypocrite. And to her hostility against him in her father's behalf and to her contempt for his quack radicalism, was added the bitter implacability of the woman who feels herself scorned. The town's attitude toward her she resented. But Bruce she hated, and him she prayed with all her soul that ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott

... underground stems or rhizomes like quack-grass, Johnsongrass, bittersweet, and the ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon

... great public square in the midst of the city. The courthouse was on one side, and over the door there was a sign which read "The Hall of Justice." Everybody seemed to be at the fair: peasants, nobles, soldiers, and citizens; rope-dancers, quack doctors, waxworks, showmen of all sorts, and bells rang and flags flew, and altogether it was just the thing for a gipsy's ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon

... him on the part of the public arose chiefly from the two causes to which I have referred—from the facts that he is neither a man of wealth nor a quack; but these are insufficient to account for the whole effect. No small portion of it is attributable to the very marked idiosyncrasy of Mr. Hawthorne himself. In one sense, and in great measure, to ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various

... calm, in the stillness of morn,— When to call 'em to breakfast Josh toots on the horn, The ducks gives a quack, and the caow gives a moo, And the childen chimes in ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various

... weekly), rather than to that of all the men living. This from him, the great dandled and petted sectarian, to a religious character so equivocal in the world's eye as that of S. T. C., so foreign to the Kirk's estimate,—can this man be a quack? The language is as affecting as the spirit of the dedication. Some friend told him, "This dedication will do you no good,"—i. e., not in the world's repute, or with your own people. "That is a reason for ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... something 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 ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... Soon he had made a great ring for the dancing; and one of the long mirrors opened, showing a door, whose existence I had not suspected; and a great negro with a flaming firepot entered the room. His entry brought applause; but he was a common quack of a performer at the beginning, for he made pretence to eat the fire, and to bring it up again from his vitals. Then, to some wild music from a fiddler, he bound coils of the flaming stuff about ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton

... of distressing evidence showed that nearly all children gained information concerning sex and reproduction from foul sources,—from misinformed playmates, degenerates, obscene pictures, booklets, and advertisements of quack doctors. At the same time the social evil and its train of tragic consequences showed no abatement. The policy of silence, after many generations ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various

... 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 the beautiful Sherborne which had once been theirs, the former could not ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse

... dives for food. It feeds on seeds of grasses, fibrous roots of plants, worms, shell fish, and insects. In feeding in shallow water the bird keeps the hind part of its body erect, while it searches the muddy bottom with its bill. When alarmed and made to fly, it utters a loud quack, the cry of the female being the louder. "It feeds silently, but after hunger is satisfied, it amuses itself with various jabberings, swims about, moves its head backward and forward, throws water over its back, shoots along the surface, half flying, ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography [July 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various

... of him in the European Magazine, Jan. 1786. BOSWELL. There we learn that he was in his time a grammar-school usher, actor, poet, the puffing partner in a quack medicine, and tutor to a youthful Earl. He was suspected of levying blackmail by threats of satiric publications, and he suffered from a disease which rendered him an object almost offensive to sight. He was born in 1738 or 1739, and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... fourth (a man of wide experience) bade him marry the worst-tempered woman he knew. Then they all gave him pills to upset his stomach; but such was its power that it assimilated them. Despairing of these, he consulted a Quack, and received the directions which brought him to Springhaven. And a lucky day for him it was, as he confessed for the rest of his life, ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... the blame rests with the public itself, which insists on being poisoned. Somebody buys all the quack medicines that build palaces for the mushroom, say rather, the toadstool millionaires. Who is it? These people have a constituency of millions. The popular belief is all but universal that sick persons should feed on noxious substances. One of our members was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... the grey river. He was already conscious of the glow of the wine in his veins. The sensation was half pleasurable, in a sense distasteful to him. He resented this artificial humanity. He had the feeling of a man who has stooped to be doped by a quack doctor. And he was ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... manner of eating and talking, so that Mrs. Mountain and even Madam Esmond were forced to laugh, and little Fanny Mountain would crow with delight. Madam Esmond would have found the fellow out for a vulgar quack but for her sons' opposition, which she, on her part, opposed with her own indomitable will. "What matters whether he has more or less of profane learning?" she asked; "in that which is most precious, Mr. W. is able to ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... off in a short 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 on both sides seemed to wander from the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... something more than exaggerated and personal assurances. In every village there are terrible butchers of vines and fruit-trees, who have some crude system of their own. They are as ignorant of the true science of the subject as a quack doctor of medicine, and, like the dispenser of nostrums, they claim to be infallible. Skilful pruning and training is really a fine art, which cannot be learned in a day or a year. It is like a surgical operation, requiring but little time, yet representing much ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe

... 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

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

... of the respectable village practitioner, as he soon explained, by describing the arrival at Tawny Rachel's cottage of a travelling quack with a ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty

... youths: "Died of excessive smoking." On the other hand, that eminent citizen of our Union, General Thomas Thumb, was about that time professionally examined in London, and his verdict on tobacco was quoted to be, that it was "one of his chief comforts"; also mention was made of a hapless quack who announced himself as coming from Boston, and who, to keep up the Yankee reputation, issued a combined advertisement of "medical advice ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various

... her head: The boding shepherd heaves a sigh, For, see! a rainbow spans the sky: The walls are damp, the ditches smell, Closed is the pink-eyed pimpernel; Hark! how the chairs and tables crack; Old Betty's joints are on the rack; Loud quack the ducks, the peacocks cry, The distant hills are seeming nigh. How restless are the snorting swine,— The busy flies disturb the kine. Low o'er the grass the swallow wings; The cricket, too, how loud it sings: Puss on the hearth with velvet paws, Sits smoothing o'er her whisker'd ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous

... believe and think them true." If mankind has found the supply of all their spiritual wants within themselves, would they have clung in this way to the pretense of external revelations? Is not the abundance of quack doctors conclusive proof of the existence of disease, and of the need ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... 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

... a sentence, That moves his patients to 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. ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... contemptible kind of cheating is quackery.—The quack is liar, thief, and murderer all in one. For in undertaking to do things for which he has no adequate training and skill, he pretends to be what he is not. He takes money for which he is unable to render a genuine equivalent. And by inducing people to trust their lives in his incompetent ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde

... neglect have been intentional?" asked Cora further. She had in mind the "quack" doctor so long sent to Salveys' by the Roland branch ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose

... your life were the forfeit. But I never believed in Burr's talent for conspiracy. He is too sanguine and visionary. He desires power, office, and emolument—rewards for his henchmen before they desert him; but I believe he'd go—or get—no farther, and the country is strong enough to stand a quack or two; while, ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... often the victim of groundless fears that use up his strength or send him in despair to seek assistance from the most easily available sources of information, those baleful writings and despicable quack practitioners everywhere soliciting and alarming youth, and whose career forms one of the saddest commentaries on the ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley

... ice on the river's back And floated it down the tide, And the wild ducks came with a loud "Quack, quack," To play in ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous

... solution. As long as we fail to follow their effects to this point, and look only at immediate effects, which act but upon individual men or classes of men as producers, we know nothing more of political economy than the quack does of medicine, when, instead of following the effects of a prescription in its action upon the whole system, he satisfies himself with knowing how it affects the ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat

... conjuror when he prepares with flourishes to whip the handkerchief away from his guinea-pig. Here is one who condescends to reader and subject alike. He would do harm all round: moreover he would be a quack, for he is just as much of a quack who makes little of much as he who makes much of little. No! Let his attitude be that of the contadino in some vast church in Italy, who walking into the cool dark gazes round-eyed at the twinkling candles ahead of him in the vague, and that he may recover himself ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett

... you, 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 ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... with all the varied diseases of that soul of man which we were to set ourselves to save. All its failings, infinitely more complicated than those of the body, were grouped as "sin," and for these there was one quack remedy. If the patient did not like the remedy, or got no good from it, the ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford

... him. He was supposed to diagnose the condition of the furnace by instinct, to possess some almost supernatural power of divination, like his congener in the country districts who was reputed to be able to locate an oil well or water supply by means of a hazel rod. He was a veritable quack doctor who applied whatever remedies occurred to him for the troubles ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie

... his side a pouch he wore, Replete with strange Hermetic powder, 225 That wounds nine miles point-blank wou'd solder; By skilful chemist, with great cost, Extracted from a rotten post; But of a heav'nlier influence Than that which mountebanks dispense; 230 Tho' by Promethean fire made, As they do quack that drive that trade. For as when slovens do amiss At others doors, by stool or piss, The learned write, a red-hot spit 235 B'ing prudently apply'd to it, Will convey mischief from the dung Unto the part that did the wrong, So this did healing; and as sure ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... years past they have not been advertised in newspapers, they being filled with sensational advertisements of quack nostrums got up for no other purpose than catch-penny ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw

... what some do, and make the audience of those great articulate ones. But there were one or two trifling doubts to set at rest before final decision. The Reader has greatly misconceived Narcissus if he has deemed him one of those simple souls whom any quack can gull, and the good faith of this mysterious fraternity was a difficult point to settle. A tentative application through the address given, an appropriate nom de mystere, had introduced the ugly detail of preliminary expenses. ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard

... on summer eve to count What dogs and beggars haunt the Pincian Mount. All Tuzzi's frauds, all Coco's falsehoods tell, And all the Beckers[1] all the rogues shall sell; How many sick some sapient quack at Rome Helps—not to England, but their longer home;[2] How many Couriers forge the scoundrel tale; How many Maids their mistress' fame assail; How many English girls, by foreign arts Seduced, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various

... some fine specimens of English, French, and German stamped bindings of the sixteenth century; several volumes of Chinese, marbled, and other papers; early almanacks; a quantity of engravings of towns, costumes, trades, furniture, etc.; curious advertisements of tobacco, tea, quack medicines, etc.; specimens of fine writing; and many other miscellaneous papers of ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher

... Among other sallies of his splenetic humor it is related, that Mr. Fox having, upon one occasion, retired from the hustings, and left to Sheridan the task of addressing the multitude, Tooke remarked, that such was always the practice of quack-doctors, who, whenever they quit the stage themselves, make it a rule to leave their merry-andrews behind. [Footnote: Tooke, it is said, upon coming one Monday morning to the hustings, was thus addressed by a pietism of his opponent, not of a very ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore

... 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

... no!" said Miss Robertson; "but a quack has often a far greater reputation than an ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various

... 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 from outside, gives a doubleness to the monologues in his Dramatic ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... while at work about the farm, boiling sap in the spring woods, driving the cows to pasture, or hoeing corn,—dreams of great wealth and splendor, of dress and equipage,—were also significant, but not prophetic. Probably what started these golden dreams was an itinerant quack phrenologist who passed the night at our house when I was a lad of eight or nine. He examined the heads of all of us; when he struck mine, he grew enthusiastic. "This is the head for you," he said; "this boy is going to be rich, very rich"; and much more to that effect. Riches was the one thing ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus

... Fortinbras was at the climax of his fortunes. She had travelled much amongst monotonous, drab towns without character or amusements. She had kept her eyes open. She had seen that it was from the denizens of the dull streets in these towns that the quack religions won their recruits. Mme. Dauvray's life had been a featureless sort of affair until these experiments had come to colour it. Madame Dauvray must at any rate preserve the memory of ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason

... resting 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, and offered ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore

... wolf turned their partnership to account at fairs, at village fetes, at the corners of streets where passers-by throng, and out of the need which people seem to feel everywhere to listen to idle gossip and to buy quack medicine. The wolf, gentle and courteously subordinate, diverted the crowd. It is a pleasant thing to behold the tameness of animals. Our greatest delight is to see all the varieties of domestication parade before us. This it is which collects so many folks ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... 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 if they did not, they would be grievously surprised by and by, for ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various

... catalogue of modern remedies is almost endless, and many of them hold alcohol in some form; but every intelligent physician knows that 90 per cent. of these alleged remedies have little or no intrinsic value. The nostrums of the quack, the bitters, elixirs, cordials, extracts, etc. nearly all contain alcohol, and this is the ingredient which aids their sale. The whole unclean list might, with advantage to mankind, ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... remembrance. Nor was his regard in this instance peculiar; for it may be said to have been a distinguishing trait in his character, to recollect with affection all who had been about him in his youth. The quack, however, was an exception; whom (from having caused him to suffer much pain, and whose pretensions, even young as he then was, he detected) he delighted to expose. On one occasion, he scribbled down on a sheet of paper, the letters of the alphabet at random, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... house, and whereas no one could find him, we feared for a long time that he had done himself a mischief. Nevertheless he was alive and of good heart. He had passed the months in a various life; first as a crier to a wandering quack, and afterwards, inasmuch as he was a nimble and likely lad, he had waited on the guests at one of the best frequented inns at Wurzberg. It came then to pass that his eminence Cardinal Branda, Nuncio from his Holiness the Pope, took up his quarters there, and he carried the lad ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... be a misanthrope. He was not aware that in the Materia Medica of Nature's laboratory there is a substance called "joy," which sometimes effects a cure when all else fails—or, if he did know of this medicine, he probably regarded it as a quack nostrum. ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne

... cross-bows. There, girls and boys were dancing to the sound of a pipe, or still smaller children were playing at marbles, or amusing themselves with the toys they had just purchased. Not far from these, a quack from one scaffold was descanting on the virtues of his medicines, whilst a preacher from another was holding forth to the graver part of the crowd, the joys and terrors of another life; and yet farther on, a motley groupe were listening to a blind beggar, who was singing ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker

... induced General Vinoy to consent to their departure. As for Gambetta, he says, it is not probable that he has now many adherents in the provinces; and it is certain that he has very few here. When a patient is given up by the faculty a quack is called in; if the quack effects a cure he is lauded to the skies; if he fails, he is regarded as a charlatan, and this is now the case with M. Gambetta. My informant is of opinion that a large number of Ultra-Radicals will be elected in Paris; this will be because the Moderates are ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere

... he was seized with an inflammatory rheumatism, a common and known case, dangerous, but scarce ever remembered to be fatal. He had a strong aversion to all physicians, and lately had put himself into the hands of one Thomson, a quack, whose foundation of method could not be guessed, but by a general contradiction to all received practice. This man was the oracle of Mrs. Masham,(1197) sister, and what one ought to hope she did not think of, coheiress to Mr. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... pin or a ribbon? We shall leave this tempting field of interesting expatiation to those whose brains are high-pressure steam-engines for spinning prose by the furlong, to be trumpeted in paid-for paragraphs in the quack's corner of newspapers: modern literature having attained the honourable distinction of sharing, with blacking and Macassar oil, the space which used to be monopolised by razor-strops and the lottery; whereby that very enlightened community, the reading public, is tricked ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock

... being expected to present himself at Browndown at a moment's notice. To being the last person informed (instead of the first) of Mr. Nugent Dubourg's exaggerated and absurd view of the case of his afflicted child. To the German surgeon, as being certainly a foreigner and a stranger, and possibly a quack. To the slur implied on British Surgery by bringing the foreigner to Dimchurch. To the expense involved in the same proceeding. Finally to the whole scope and object of Mr. Nugent Dubourg's proposal, which had for its origin rebellion against the ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins

... feel allied, To frogs by kinship tied; For water drinking is no joke, Ere long you all will hear me croak Quack water! CHORUS:—Of ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... my attention was drawn to the very elegant appearance of all the gates and rails adjacent to the road. As the ground was always beautifully farmed and in good order, the condition of the gates did not surprise me. There was, however, a story attached to their smartness. A seller of quack medicines had sent out advertisers with most objectionable little bills, which he had posted on every gate adjoining the roads. My entertainer, who was the occupier of the land, had brought an action against ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish

... The advertising quack who wearies With tales of countless cures, His teeth, I've enacted, Shall all be extracted By terrified amateurs: The music-hall singer attends a series Of masses and fugues and "ops" By Bach, interwoven ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert

... short spell of unemployment means starvation and despair. This is evidently a state of affairs which Socialist agitators favour because it will increase their following.—Another prominent Socialist writer says: "Among the many quack remedies for poverty, the most venerable and the most illusive is thrift or saving. The habit of saving is always represented by the rich as the highest of social virtues; but it is one they are careful rarely to practise themselves"[856]—If the rich are so wasteful, ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... stream of strange vagabonds drifted along the road: minstrels who wandered from fair to fair, a foul and pestilent crew; jugglers and acrobats, quack doctors and tooth-drawers, students and beggars, free workmen in search of better wages, and escaped bondsmen who would welcome any wages at all. Such was the throng which set the old road smoking in a haze of white dust from Winchester to ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the discoverer be one of themselves, they are apt to regard his proposition with a certain amount of distrust, but if he happens to be a layman they instantly stand upon their dignity denounce all irregular practice and raise the cry of quack. ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell

... honey, and is overflowing with milk. In one region grows no poisonous herb, nor does a querulous frog ever quack in it; no scorpion exists, nor does the serpent glide amongst the grass, nor can any poisonous animals exist in it, or injure ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... speaks ten languages, and whatever countryman he pretends to be, he is accepted as such. He appears now as a merchant, then a soldier, again as a seafaring man; to-day a Turk, to-morrow a Greek. He once came out as a Polish count, then as the betrothed of a Russian princess, and again as a quack doctor, who cured all maladies with his pills. What his real profession may be no one knows. But one thing is certain, he is a paid spy. Whether in the service of the Turks, Austrians, or Russians, who can tell? Perhaps he is in the pay of all three and more besides—he serves each, and betrays ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

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

... Ambrose was reminded of a quack doctor in poor circumstances. He was middle-aged and flabby, and had long, straggling gray hair, bound round with a cotton fillet, ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner

... America; they are spare and pallid. Not many ruddy complexions. Why all these sharp-faced, lantern-jawed, lean, sallow, hard-handed people? Why this depression of spirits? Perhaps they really get a thrill out of religion after all. Why all these advertisements of quack remedies, why all this calling on God? This is a place of bright sunshine and exhilarating air. After all, ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... instance, have the greatest possible dislike for the trade in patent medicines. He might object to the swindling of the poor which is the soul of that trade. He might himself have suffered acute physical pain through the imprudent absorption of one of those quack drugs. But he certainly could not print an article against them, nor even an article describing how they were made, without losing a great part of his income, directly; and, perhaps, indirectly, the whole of it, from the annoyance caused to other advertisers, who would ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc

... in popularity with the people who go to fairs for the purposes of pleasure. Hither came half the tumblers, rope-walkers, contortionists, balancers, bear-leaders, puppet-players, wrestlers, strong men, fat women, bearded ladies, living skeletons, horrible deformities, lion-tamers, quack doctors, mountebanks, and jugglers who patrolled Europe in those days, and earned a precarious living and enjoyed the sweets of a vagabond freedom in the plying ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... circulation are improved. In some cases we find what is called a phantom tumor. There really is no tumor, although the symptoms may be such that even reliable physicians are misled. The symptoms are due to a nervous condition. These phantom tumors have given many a quack a reputation for removing tumors without the use of ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry

... and clatter that Mrs. Gerome, who happened to get a glimpse of them, felt sorry for the poor frightened fowl, and tried to drive the little ones out of the water; but, whenever she put her hand towards them to catch the nearest, the whole brood would quack and dive,—and, when she had laughed that one short laugh, she called to me to look after them and went back to the house. You don't know how ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... calculation and imposture—how much was false sensibility—and how much true feeling? Where did the lie begin, and did he know where? and where did the truth end in the art and scheme of this man of genius, this actor, this quack? Some time since, I was in the company of a French actor, who began after dinner, and at his own request, to sing French songs of the sort called des chansons grivoises, and which he performed admirably, and ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... 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; but ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge

... published [Footnote: This letter, though shattered by the sharp shot of Dr Horne of Oxford's wit, in the character of 'One of the People called Christians', is still prefixed to Mr Home's excellent History of England, like a poor invalid on the piquet guard, or like a list of quack medicines sold by the same bookseller, by whom a work of whatever nature is published; for it has no connection with his History, let it have what it may with what are called his Philosophical Works. A worthy friend of mine in London ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... 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 ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.

... fortnight his father was a steady, hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazed with alcohol. His mother cooked for the miners. Her one ambition was that her son should enter a profession. He was apprenticed to a traveling quack dentist and after ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... newspaper, and struck off ten thousand woodcuts of the Projected Villages, which afforded an ocular demonstration to all who saw them of the practicability of Mr. Owen's whole scheme. He comes into a room with one of these documents in his hand, with the air of a schoolmaster and a quack doctor mixed, asks very kindly how you do, and on hearing you are still in an indifferent state of health owing to bad digestion, instantly turns round and observes that 'All that will be remedied in his plan; that indeed he thinks too much attention has been paid to the mind, and ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... feet 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 his grave but once a-week; This earth, which bears his body's print, You'll find ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... Sometime before the boy has reached thirteen, the father will have explained to him the facts and temptations of the pubescent period. The crime of allowing boys in middle and later adolescence to worry themselves sick over normal nocturnal emissions, and often to fall into the hands of the quack, or of the advocate of illicit intercourse, lies at the door of ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben

... refused 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 and come to his aid, and ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris

... campaign against the weeds, which advance like successive armies. No sooner is one growth slain than a different and perhaps more pestiferous class rises in its place—the worst of the Philistines being nut-grass, quack-grass, and—direst foe of ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... sort of doctor," Russ replied. "I think he's a quack, myself. I wouldn't have him for a sick cat. But he calls himself a doctor and surgeon. So that's all ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Snowbound - Or, The Proof on the Film • Laura Lee Hope

... are also sold in the streets. The street traders carry a bamboo pole across the shoulder. From the ends of this pole they sling the baskets in which they carry their wares. Many workmen ply their trades in the open street, and you are sure to see quack ...
— Highroads of Geography • Anonymous

... thought of them. In spite of Trudi's advice and example she continued to treat the pastor with the deference due to a good and simple man. What did it matter if he talked twice as much as he need have done, and wearied her with his habit of puffing Christianity as though it were a quack medicine of which he was the special patron? He was sincere, he really believed something, and really felt something, and after five days with Trudi Anna turned to Manske's elementary convictions with relief. In five days she had come to be very glad that Trudi ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp

... said 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

... she tried to make the duck come over and carry her, but the duck said, "Quack! Quack!" and shook ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs

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



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



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com