"A QUACK AND HIS VICTIM."

The patient or his victim: the therapist's dilemma.

Helping a Victim or Helping the Victim: Altruism and Identifiability

Although it has been claimed that people care more about identifiable than statistical victims, demonstrating this “identifiable victim effect” has proven difficult because identification usually provides information about a victim, and people may respond to the information rather than to identification per se. We show that a very weak form of identifiability—determining the victim without prov...

The quack doctor of Serpukhov.

The anodyne necklace: a quack remedy and its promotion.

Infant mortality in the eighteenth century was notoriously high,' and much of the morbidity and mortality was directly attributed to teething, both in the vulgar mind,2 and, equally, in the medical.3 No one wanted to lose a child, even though parental affection and attachment might not be as strong in times of high infant mortality.4 There would always be a ready market for any product which so...

medical mimesis: healing signs of a cosmopolitan "quack"

"Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littre). Thus feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false," between "real" and "imaginary." Since the simu...