ABSTRACT
Visual cues to mountebank and quack activity, including their wares and containers, their stages, settings and costumes, and the size of their troupes, have been identified and reviewed in Chapters 4-6. Before turning to their medical activities, this chapter overviews some of their characteristic performative activities. ‘Whether’, as the physician Richard Whitlock put it, they ‘keep to private practise, or mount’ public stages, the defining characteristic of the genuine quack is the marketing of medicine through some kind of spectacle targeted at an interactive audience.1 Quacks were performers. The indivisible synthesis of performance and medicine offered by every successful itinerant healer ranged from subtle forms of enhanced self-presentation to the staging of full-scale plays. Quacks used theatricality, in its widest possible sense, to attract customers, promote their healing abilities, and enhance the therapeutic effects of their products. They caught the attention of the curious and advertised their products and services, by using handbills supporting their promotional orations, wearing distinctive costume and displaying promotional material lending substance to their professed medical credentials. This latter included posters with medical illustrations, ranging in size from small banners to theatrical backdrops (Plates 3, 7, 9 and 26). The visual record is replete with depictions of the certificates with which northern quacksalvers, in particular, delighted in proclaiming their alleged qualifications and cures. Often, they are written in gold or silver on parchment, and authenticated with weighty seals.2 They also displayed live and stuffed animals, medical instruments and realia such as kidney stones, teeth or piles of writhing worms, intended as graphic demonstrations of their medical specialities to the illiterate.
