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It seemed that I knew it all, before, as I did, because, in my own way, I had thought out the problem of the growth of the varying forms of animal life, exactly to the Darwinian conclusion. Whitman's Leaves of Grass became my Bible. It was at this time that I made the harrowing discovery that I had been working evil on myself ... through an advertisement of a quack in a daily paper.
The physician who does the last is a quack; the spiritual advisor who dies the first is Grossly ignorant of his profession. To do nothing but pray is a wrong done to prayer itself, and can only end in disaster. It is as if one tried to live only with the lungs, as if one assimilated only air and neglected solid food.
As against that, he set the unforgotten picture of the itinerant quack, vending his poison across the countryside, playing on desperate fears and tragic hopes, coining his dollars from the grimmest of false dies; and now that same quack, powerful, rich, generous, popular, master of the good things of life, still draining out his millions from the populace, through just such deadly swindling as that which had been lighted up by the flaring exploitation of the oil torches fifteen years before.
It's an age since we encountered last, colonel: on board the Dublin boat, I recollect, and a night it was." "I recollect that you set me on my legs, doctor." "Ah! and you'll please to notify that Corney's no quack at sea, by favour of the monks of the Chartreuse, whose elixir has power to still the waves. And we hear that miracles are done with!" "Roll a physician and a monk together, doctor!"
'I would prescribe a course of it, Cecilia; yes, he turned to her. 'The Dr. Dulcamara of a single drug? 'Now you have a name for me! Tory arguments always come to epithets. 'It should not be objectionable. Is it not honest to pretend to have only one cure for mortal maladies? There can hardly be two panaceas, can there be? 'So you call me quack?
In the course of a speech 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 they would make the discovery which Captain Boycott had made, that the English government would find that it did not pay from an Imperial point of view to support a worse than useless class against the Irish nation.
Men by the hundred are making these experiments, and almost daily the quack or the stock promoter comes forward with the announcement of a discovery which proves to be a revelation a revelation of human stupidity or criminal cupidity. On this line the men of science do not sing a song of the richest hope; they shrug their shoulders, exclaiming with uplifted hands: "Well, may be, may be."
A physician, unless a quack, never promises relief from a deep-seated disease without any pain or discomfort. And if the disease is the result of indulgence, he warns us that relapse into indulgence will bring a worse recurrence of the pain. Perhaps, after all, Socrates was not so far from right when he maintained that if a man had sinned the best and only thing for him is to suffer for it.
The horses and carriage were waiting at the door and they mounted to their seats. David was embarrassed by the novelty of the situation, and Pepeeta by his presence; but the quack was in his highest spirits. He saluted the bystanders with easy familiarity, ostentatiously flung the hostler a coin, flourished his whip and excited universal admiration for his driving.
La Croissette softly whistled, and presently talked of other things. By-and-by he said, "Now we are coming to a town, and you shall see some fun." "Will it be quite safe?" "Safer than anything else. It is a fair-day; I shall drive straight into the market-place, blow my horn, and play the quack doctor. Nay, you shall be my accomplice and blow the horn. Let me put you in costume at once."
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