Chicanery in earlier times. (Current and Coming).

With the proliferation of government regulations affecting every aspect of industry, it is difficult to imagine that rules were relatively recent in medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. Anyone could hang out a doctor's shingle in England until the passage of the Medical Registration Act in 1858. In the United States by 1842 only New York, New Jersey Louisiana, and Georgia had legislation regulating the practice of medicine, and it was not until 1906 that Congress passed the first Pure Food and Drug Act.

Fraudulent doctors and sellers of nostrums have hawked their wares throughout the world since earliest times. Already in the thirteenth century in Paris, when the population was about sixteen thousand, there were thirty-eight charlatans and only six physicians listed on the tax rolls. Quacks were the subject of satirical prints by eminent artists like William Hogarth and James Gillray and hucksters flaunted their specious cure-ails on posters, broadsides, and other printed formats. Examples collected by William H. Helfand are the subject of an exhibition on view at the Grolier Club in New York City from September 18 to November 23. The collector organized the show, which is entitled Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters Ephemera and Books.

Helfand started to collect this material, which covers four hundred years of quackery, when he began his career in the pharmaceutical industry fifty years ago. As he aptly points out in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, since quack is both a pejorative and a subjective term, it is ...