ABSTRACT
As Matthew Ramsey has said in his study of professional and popular medicine in France, ‘The medical charlatan of early modern Europe was an immediately recognizable type.’1 He quotes the eighteenth-century Dictionnaire de Trevoux’s definition of the charlatan: ‘Empiric, false physician, who gets up on a stage in the public square, to sell theriac or other drugs and who gathers the people by magical tricks and clowning, to sell his drugs more easily.’2 Identifying the charlatan more specifically as the ‘itinerant mountebank’,3 Ramsey describes his typical appear ances at the fairs and marketplaces of France, moving often from area to area and frequently accompanied by a large entourage of assistants and gaily dressed performers.4
