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  • Article

The making of ‘Quacks’

How do you create a medical comedy that’s authentic and laugh-out-loud funny?

  • Article

Graphic battles in pharmacy

James Morison’s campaign against the medical establishment inspired a wave of caricatures mocking his quack medicine.

  • Article

Rethinking the placebo effect

The placebo effect has long been harnessed for both legitimate and fraudulent use, but we’re only just discovering how and why our bodies respond positively to dummy drugs, as Anjuli Sharma reveals.

  • Article

The doctor who challenged the unicorn myth

Our era of fake news and medical misinformation is nothing new. Estelle Paranque relays the thrusts and parries of a 440-year-old row over a magical cure-all, the unicorn horn.

All stories (9)

Images

  • A monkey, dressed in human clothing and holding up a medicinal remedy: representing quacks or itinerant medicine vendors. Lithograph by W. Nichol after J. Watteau.
  • All who suffer from rheumatism, gout, sciatica, lumbago, torpid liver, indigestion ... or any form of disease or weakness should avoid poisonous drugs, quack medicines ... and try the marvellous curative efficacity of Mr. C.B. Harness' world-famed bona-fide "Electropathic" belt / the Electropathic & Zander Institute.
  • All who suffer from rheumatism, gout, sciatica, lumbago, torpid liver, indigestion ... or any form of disease or weakness should avoid poisonous drugs, quack medicines ... and try the marvellous curative efficacity of Mr. C.B. Harness' world-famed bona-fide "Electropathic" belt / the Electropathic & Zander Institute.
  • [Theatre programme for performances at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, London by Maskelyne & Cooke, the Royal illusionists and anti-spiritualists with 4 plays (one about quack doctors : Decapitation, or no cure, no pay) and a display of Chinese plate dancing. Advert for E. Rimmel's perfumes and choice novelties on the back].
  • [Theatre programme for performances at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, London by Maskelyne & Cooke, the Royal illusionists and anti-spiritualists with 4 plays (one about quack doctors : Decapitation, or no cure, no pay) and a display of Chinese plate dancing. Advert for E. Rimmel's perfumes and choice novelties on the back].
  • [Theatre programme for performances at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, London by Maskelyne & Cooke, the Royal illusionists and anti-spiritualists with 4 plays (one about quack doctors : Decapitation, or no cure, no pay) and a display of Chinese plate dancing. Advert for E. Rimmel's perfumes and choice novelties on the back].
  • [Theatre programme for performances at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, London by Maskelyne & Cooke, the Royal illusionists and anti-spiritualists with 4 plays (one about quack doctors : Decapitation, or no cure, no pay) and a display of Chinese plate dancing. Advert for E. Rimmel's perfumes and choice novelties on the back].
  • Sidrophel vapulans: or, the quack-astrologer toss'd in a blanket / by the author of Medicaster medicatus, [i.e. J. Young] In an epistle to W[illia]m S[almo]n. With a postscript, reflecting briefly on his late scurrilous libel against the Royal College of Physicians, entituled, A rebuke to the authors of a Blue Book. By the same hand.
  • A travelling healer demonstrating the extraction of a tooth from the mouth of a woman patient, before a crowd of onlookers. Etching attributed to Cornelis de Wael.
  • A Saadi, or Egyptian shaman using snakes and incantations to cure a sick man. Engraving by T. Wallis, 1806, after W.M. Craig.
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