We are likely to think that quackery is comparatively new, or at least fostered by popular education, and that unscrupulous struggle for success which is sometimes considered a characteristic of our times. I have been rather interested, however, in tracing out a series of chapters in the history of quackery which show that the methods, the ways, the motives and the character of the quack have been about the same from time immemorial, in all countries of the world. We might think, for instance, that the quack of the occident would be quite different from the quack of the orient; but much evidence—among other things, a little story in the Arabian Nights—shows how many of the characteristics of the quack persist to the farthest limits of space and time.
The Arabian Nights themselves—that is, the series of stories which we know by that name—were given a definite collective form (probably