ABSTRACT
The term charlatan has fallen from its old pedestal of quasi-respectability into the gutter of pure quackery. The word charlatan entered into French and English from Italian, but charlatans in early modern Italian states practiced the licensed occupation of peddling medicines as well as delivering healthcare (“simple forms of medicine”) to a “wide sector of the population.” Medical tribunals licensed charlatans in the Kingdom of Naples and the Papal States. Of course they were not doctors, and in 1632 one physician defined them as “people who appear in the square and sell a few things with entertainments and buffoonery.” So even if the term is “a constructed category” popular with historians, the degradation of name is not a recent development.2 Even in the eighteenth century it carried a pejorative patina, though “it was used interchangeably with ‘empirique’ [empiric] ... for a self-styled physician.” Not quite all charlatans “in early modern France were primarily glorified dung peddlers.”3 In 1833 the Gazette médicale de Paris published a long and apparently waggish, anonymous defense of general as well as medical charlatanism.4 Nowadays we may be tempted to think of charlatanism as “the creation of professionalism,” excluded from medicine because charlatans are not subjected to medical authority and operate outside the professional rules based on exclusive claims of expertise and objectivity.5 In 1833 the Gazette’s author was not interested in the assessment of medical therapies but in defining charlatanism in a new way as the application of industry to medicine and in praising the great
advantage of “medical industrialism.”6 Making millions from selling a drug is a good thing, for, after all, what medical practitioner could buy a château after only a few years’ work? Science is an excellent thing, but without industry it is impotent. Since industry in medicine is what one condemns as charlatanism, the general introduction of the industrial spirit into medicine would cause the prejudice against charlatanism to disappear. Looked at through this linguistic lens, charlatanism becomes a quality worthy of widespread emulation.
