Quack doctors are indeed pompous, self-sufficient, affectedly solemn, venal and unfeeling with a vengeance. VICESIMUS KNOX, D.D. If Satan has ever succeeded in compressing a greater amount of concentrated mendacity into one set of human bodies, above every other description, it is in the advertising quacks. _Pacific Medical and Surgical Journal._ The bold and unblushing assertion of the empiric, of a never-failing remedy, constantly reiterated, inspires confidence in the invalid, and not unfrequently tends by its operation on the mind, to assist in the eradication of disorder. THOS. J. PETTIGREW, F.R.S. The word _quack_, meaning a charlatan, is an abbreviation of _quack-salver_. To quack is to utter a harsh, croaking sound, like a duck; and hence secondarily, to talk noisily and to make vain and loud pretensions.[202:1] And a salver is one who undertakes to perform cures by the application of ointments or cerates. Hence the term quack-salver was commonly used in the seventeenth century, signifying an ignorant person, who was wont to extol the curative virtues of his salves. Now we see, said Francis Bacon, in "The Advancement of Learning,"[202:2] the weakness and credulity of men. For they will often prefer a mountebank or witch before a learned physician. And therefore the poets were clear-sighted in discerning this extreme folly, when they made Esculapius and Circe brother and sister. For in all times, in the opinion of the multitude, witches, old women and impostors have had a competition with physicians. According to one authority, the term _quack_ is derived from an ancient Saxon word, signifying small, slender and trifling, and hence was applied to shallow and frivolous itinerant peddlers, who foisted upon a credulous community such wares as penny-plasters, balsam of liquorice for coughs, snuffs for headaches, and infallible eye-lotions.[203:1] It has also been maintained that quack is a corruption of _quake_, and that quack-doctors were so called because, in marshy districts, patients affected with intermittent fever, sometimes vulgarly known as the _quakes_, were wont to be treated by ignorant persons, who professed to charm away the disease, and hence were styled _quake-doctors_.