ABSTRACT
Part II concluded with an overview of itinerant performative activities, some relating to medical activity and some independent of it. By no means all mountebanks, even those whose performances included medical aspects, actively promoted medicine. Conversely, the commercial activities of many quacks were primarily medically orientated. Even so, the traditional alliance between medicine and theatre supported a flourishing economy in early modern Europe. Part III surveys a broad spectrum of health-related services and products marketed, often with the use of theatricality, in its widest sense, by itinerant healers, while Part IV narrows the focus to examine one specialist area of health care, the care of teeth. By marketing products and services that target the anxieties of the sick or disabled and those concerned to disguise routine non-pathological signs of encroaching age or to protect themselves from potential illness or infirmity, quackery taps into potentially limitless profits. As such, this second-oldest profession is a major economic driving force of many significant media bandwagons. For some, like Madame Chiarini, the pull of centuries of family tradition proved too strong. The Chiarinis of Charleville, male and female, had exhibited their exotic beasts and displays of acrobatics, ropedancing, ‘English’ horse-riding and ‘Chinese’ shadow theatre, all over eighteenth-century Europe, including Leipzig, Ulm, Hamburg and, in 1786, London.2 Well into the opening decades of the twentieth century, she and her assistants, splendidly resistant to innovation, showed snakes, pulled teeth and peddled their patent ‘war balm’ around France on horseback.3 Others kept up with the changing times. Television was pioneered by the pharmaceutical companies who bankrolled the ‘soaps’, as a vehicle for the commercial breaks that are the medium’s defining feature. The brash theatricality of professional showpeople still resonates in the horoscope columns of the press, from the Sunday Times’s Shelley von Strunckel and her ‘handpicked team of professional astrologers’ downwards, and in the interminable pop-ups and spam emails of the twenty-first-century porn merchants and pill-peddlers underpinning the
1 Various aspects of Part III were previously considered, and in some cases pursued in greater detail, in Katritzky, ‘The Mountebank: A case study’; ‘Unser sind drey’; ‘Marketing Medicine’; ‘Gendering Tooth-drawers’.
