Quelling quackery

Suzie Grogan ends her series tracing the development of the medical profession with an examination of the battle for the pennies of the poor.

A doctor administers ‘a gentle emetic’

John Corry was the author of The Detector of Quackery, published in 1802, and determined to expose fraud, not just in the medical profession, but across a wide range of the arts and science.

An Irish-born writer and journalist, Corry wrote the ‘detector’ as a ‘well-intended satire [to] rouse the public to just indignation against the quacks and their abettors’.

He said that ‘Quack doctors’, some of whom he mentions by name, ‘practise their fraudulent arts with most success in a wealthy commercial country like England, especially in the busy populous and luxurious capital, where the multitude have neither leisure or inclination to detect imposture’.

Corry was determined, by such satirical exposure, to alert the population to the dangers inherent in a number of medicines, available directly from a sales person or via newspaper advertisements, and given credence or support by legal patent.