Word: quack
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This gloomy Victorian coastal mansion is run by a bland sharper who calls himself Dr. Chesterfield. An educational quack, Chesterfield prates of clean minds and bodies but has sold four of the school's five bathtubs. Boating and riding are advertised in the school brochure. But the boat is a suicidally leaky scow, and riding is discontinued when the resident donkey drops dead and is carved to vary the diet of congealed herring and paste porridge...
Lysenko argued that newly acquired characteristics could be genetically passed on through succeeding generations, a provably quack notion that served the Communist notion of making over man by making over society. In 1939 he engineered the disgrace of the Soviet...
Author Turner's most savage anecdotes are from the annals of court medicine. In a day when only God could save a King, a typical court quack was John of Gaddesden (probably Chaucer's "verrey parfit practisour"). John went so far as to publish a list of ailments that, financially, were beneath his notice. His gaudiest feat: curing Edward I's son of smallpox by swaddling the boy in scarlet robes, confining him to a room hung with scarlet drapes, claiming that the color's influence turned the trick. The 17th century court physician had less...
...daily Il Giorno (circ. 150,000), coming to the astonished realization that the Pope's chief physician was not a tried clinician, asked what was, perhaps, the most startling question raised by the whole furor: "How could Pius XII entrust his health for so many years to a quack...
...doctor's methods include the Nutritional, Dynamic, Informational, Sexual, Devotional, Preoccupational, Virtue and Vice Therapies, not to mention Theotherapy and Atheotherapy. This genius-quack, "a kind of super-pragmatist," tells Patient Horner: "It would not be well in your case to believe in God. Religion will only make you despondent. But until we work out something for you it will be useful to subscribe to some philosophy. Why don't you read Sartre and become an existentialist? . . . Study the World Almanac: it is to be your breviary for a while...