PBA Galleries

Quackery Unmasked: or a Consideration of the most prominent Empirical Schemes of the Present Time… (Boston, 1858) First Edition. Original cloth.334pp.

King was a Rhode Island Doctor who manufactured “negro cloth” for southern slaves while becoming an active leader of the voting rights “Dorr Rebellion” of the 1840s. Priding himself on being “radically opposed to humbug of every description”, this book was King’s attack on “irregular practictioners” of non-traditional medical “nostrums” such as Homeopathy, Hydropathy (Water Cure) and Indian Medicine.  But on a par with the “quacks” he found so offensive were “Female Physicians”, the product of a recent American “scheme” by “misanthropic” male subversives which ran contrary to the “order of nature”. Appearing just ten years after Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in the world to graduate from a medical school, this critique was one of the first virulent attacks by the medical establishment on women whose hands were “never intended…to grasp the dissecting knife”, losing “all feminine loveliness” by plunging their “hands into the gore of dead men” and thus becoming objects of “universal horror and disgust”.