Relating to Quacks, Quackery and Nostrums, Part 1

"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. It is a term of condemnation employed when one wants to belittle another. Above all, the term has become associated with the sellers of medicines and the marketers of medical systems, those with the "true" method of curing specific ills or, in an earlier day, all the ills of mankind.

While the origins of the term are obscure, the term "quack" probably came from the Dutch Quacksalber, a charlatan, mountebank, empiric or itinerant seller of medicine. It may also have been derived from the sounds made by a duck, the term applied to the hawker of nostrums whose excessive zeal in describing the merits of his or her cure may well have sounds similar to the squawking of a duck. The chatter of the quack, in most cases more like torrent s of words, would have been familiar to both town and rural populations even in the ancient periods, for quacks have long been well known in every society. Over the past four hundred years they have been representative figures in folktales, stories and especially in prints, drawings and political caricatures..." –William H. Helfand, from Quack Quack Quack


Detail from "Quid hic nobis lumine satium", c. 1670, Anonymous


Detail from advertisement for Dr. Rock's Tincture, 1738, Anonymous


"The Dance of Death: the Undertaker and the Quack." 1816, by Thomas Rowlandson (from Wellcome Library)


"Nancy Linton: A faithful representation of her actual appearance & condition after having been cured by the use of Swann's Panacea", c. 1833, by C Hullmandel (from a drawing by WH Kearney)


"Singular Effects of the Universal Vegetable Pills on a Green Crocer! A Fact!", 1841, by Charles Jameson Grant


Detail from "The Great Lozenge Maker", 1858, by John Leech - from Punch


"Dr S.B. Collins' Painless Opium Antidote" Advertisement, 1874


"Quackery - Medical Minstrel Performing for the Benefit of Their Former Patients - No other Dead-heads Admitted", 1879, by Joseph Keppler - from Puck


"Death's-Head Doctors - Many Paths to the Grave", 1881, by Joseph Keppler - from Puck


Detail of "Death's-Head Doctors - Many Paths to the Grave", 1881, by Joseph Keppler - from Puck


Detail of "Death's-Head Doctors - Many Paths to the Grave", 1881, by Joseph Keppler - from Puck


"Death in the Pestle", c. 1885, by Henry Nappenbach - from The Wasp


Detail of "Death in the Pestle", c. 1885, by Henry Nappenbach - from The Wasp


"The Travelling Quack", 1889, by Tom Merry


An itinerant medicine vendor known as Medicine Jack carrying his wares in a knapsack on his back. (from Wellcome Library)


"William Radam, Microbes and the Microbe Killer", 1890


"The Great American Fraud, an investigative article by Samuel Hopkins Adams", 1907


Quack advertisement for the cure of cancer, 1912 (from Wellcome Library)

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Unless noted all of these come from Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera, & Books by William Helfand - @ Open Library [link]
Wellcome Library has a good collection of quackery related images [link]
The excellent blog The Quack Doctor [link]
The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices [link]
see the blog Quack Cogitations [link]
Quack cartoons at cartoonstock [link]
BBC slideshow: Quacks and Cures [link]

Tibetan Anatomical Paintings

These Tibetan medical tangkas were "painted by the Nepalese tangka artist Romio Shrestha and his Tibetan, Nepalese, and Bhutanese students in Kathmandu during seven years in the late 1980's and early 1990's."


The Face of Impermanence


Images of Impermanence


Cadaver


Vulnerable Points


The Inner Mandala


Chakras and Energy Channels


Chakras and Energy Channels


Topographical Lines of Channels



"Thangkas illustrations of the points of the body associated with bloodletting, moxibustion and minor surgery, differentiated, respectively, by the use of the colors blue, yellow and red."


Bloodletting Channels


Dzogchen Channels


Cranial Physiognomy


Anatomy of Light


Anatomical Grids

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some of these illustrations come from the book The Tibetan Art of Healing by Ian A. Baker - worldcat [link] Powell's books [link] - amazon [link]
others (along with many more) are from the American Museum of Natural History's collection "Body & Spirit: Tibetan Medical Paintings" [link]
Romio Shrestha's website [link]

19th Century Japanese Drug Advertisments

Kyō maruyama okaruyaki - Lightly baked confection by Kyō maruyama. (late 19th century)


Fukunai dokusō-gan - Internal poison cleansing pills (if taken for a month, cleans various poison sicknesses such as syphilis and gonorrhea). (late 19th century)


Shinyaku Sonota - Divine Medicine and others, with portraits of Jun Matsumoto, Shochu Sato, and Ki Hayashi. (Hashimoto Chikanobu, 1878)


Shōni-yaku-ō Kindoru-san - King of children's drug: Kinder-Puwder (Morikawa Chikashige, 1880)


Rakuzen-dō sanyaku: Hoyō-gan, Chinryūin, Ontsū-gan, Megusuri Seiki-sui - Three drugs from Rakuzendō for low energy, heart-burn, and constipation (Eitaku, late 19th century)


Tsukisarae kokoku; Kaitetsu-gan – monthly cleansing (c 1830)


Yōtetsugan - Iodide iron pill (Hasegawa Sadanobu, mid-late 19th century)


Miruwa kusuri kasumi no hikifuda - Medicine for clear vision. (Utagawa Yoshitsuya, 1862)


Miruwa kusuri kasumi no hikifuda - Medicine for clear vision. (Utagawa Yoshitsuya, 1862)


Benri ohaguro tokiwa no tsuya - Easy to use teeth-blackening oxide, Tokiwa no tsuya means "everlasting luster" and is also the name of the woman pictured (Hasegawa Sadanobu II, late 19th century)


Hikan yakuōen - drug for spleen and liver (1895)


Ichikawa Danjūro kōen Seisei gan - Ichikawa Danjūrō announcing the drug “Seisei gan” (for hangover) (Utagawa Toyokuni III, mid 19th century)

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all images are from San Francisco University's Japanese Woodblock Print Collection [link]
see more at Digital Clendening's Japanese Art on the Subject of Medicine [link]

15th Century Illustrations of the Human Body

from "Claudius Pseudo-Galen" (I'm a bit confused by this, because Claudius Galen was a second century Roman physician, so I am assuming that these illustrations must be inspired by his science[?])


"'Wound man' - flesh tinted: weapons colored.



'Muscle Man' - The circles on either side of the head illustrate the two of the four supposed ventricles of the brain.



'Muscles Man' showing the muscles and spine on an anatomical diagram.



'Skeleton Man' - anatomical painting of the skeletal structure of a human man.


Pregnant woman, seated legs apart, flesh tinted.

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all images linked from Wellcome Images [link]