The changing face of quack doctors: Satirizing mountebanks and physicians in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century england

Abstract

In early modern England, there was an array of medical practitioners, and irregular practitioners far exceeded the regular. Satirical writings and images that mock quack doctors were widespread in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century England. This study looks at the changing satirical representations of quack doctors in a variety of cultural documents during this period: broadside images, speeches and songs of mountebanks, literary parodies of mountebank acts, satirical caricatures of quack doctors in illustrations and writings. These representations of quack doctors indicate the popular imagination of what constituted quackery-of both licensed and unlicensed practitioners, what deserved to be mocked and laughed at, what had to be condemned and vilified. They also capture shifts in society's perceptions and responses in the cultural history of medicine in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.