27 Nov 2019
Cholera: A Panoply of Useless Remedies
Emily WinterEmily Winter is an archivist of everything from the miasmatic to the purulent.
quack medicine
22 Oct 2019
Quacks Galore!
Pillbox (Edward William John Hopley), Quack: An Ignorant Pretender, [1838], Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine Why do we call a person who promotes fradulent or harmful medicine under the guise of medical expertise a “quack”? The term comes from the 17th century Middle Dutch kwaksalver: a combination of kwaken (to brag, boast, or croak) […]
19 Aug 2019
James Gillray
James Gillray was a contemporary of Thomas Rowlandson, and he could be every bit as biting in his representations of medicine. For example, in 1801 he satirized the craze from the US to Britain for Perkin’s Tractors, a device whose “inventor,” Elisha Perkins, claimed it cured all manner of disease through electric force. Gillray skewers […]
20 Jan 2020
Doctors Differ: Early Medical Caricature & the Birth of the Comics Form
This grows out of a talk I first gave at the American Association for the History of Medicine Conference in Columbus in April, 2019. On October 30, I had the opportunity to give an expanded version for the Heberden Society History of Medicine Lecture series at the New York Academy of Medicine. I am immensely […]
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