And now I had to look up “why are bad doctors called quacks”
The term quack originates from quacksalver, or kwakzalver, a Dutch word for a seller of nostrums, medical cures of dubious and secretive origins. (Nostrums were the over-the-counter medications of the early modern world, available without a doctor’s prescription and taken at one’s own risk.) Quacks during this time were unregulated practitioners, many of whom were too uneducated to enter physicians’ guilds or too “low-born” to be welcomed by medical colleges. Instead they plied their trade on street corners and at country fairs, hawking homemade remedies in loud, attention-grabbing voices—hence the term quack, likening their cries to noisy ducks or geese.
And now I had to look up “why are bad doctors called quacks”
The term quack originates from quacksalver, or kwakzalver, a Dutch word for a seller of nostrums, medical cures of dubious and secretive origins. (Nostrums were the over-the-counter medications of the early modern world, available without a doctor’s prescription and taken at one’s own risk.) Quacks during this time were unregulated practitioners, many of whom were too uneducated to enter physicians’ guilds or too “low-born” to be welcomed by medical colleges. Instead they plied their trade on street corners and at country fairs, hawking homemade remedies in loud, attention-grabbing voices—hence the term quack, likening their cries to noisy ducks or geese.