Fear of the known

The persistence of charlatanry irritates doctors, who would much prefer to have a monopoly of foolishness as well as of wisdom. How is it that those who strain at the gnats of science so often swallow the camels of superstition?

Dr Verdo, from the town of Marmande in the Lot and Garonne, set out in 1867 to answer this question in his short book Charlatanry and Charlatans in Medicine: A Psychological Study. He classified firstly the consumers and then the producers of charlatanry, using his own experience and intuition rather than the methods favoured today. This conduced to brevity, if not necessarily to accuracy.

Dr Verdo says that women are in first place of those susceptible to the lure of charlatans and their wares, for women are “impressionable, changeable and tender, and judge more by imagination and feeling than by logic and good sense.” Next come artists and mystic poets, “sensitive souls who are a little mad, and float above the realities of life, searching for unknown shores beyond inhabited regions.”

After them are the gamblers, soldiers, sailors, industrialists, and speculators—all those who habitually take risks. Peasants are next, whose ignorance and isolation predisposes to superstition. The least susceptible to charlatanry are doctors, philosophers, physicists, and other scientists who are “used to examining the causes of things, to sound out the secrets of nature, and are always wary of the errors of judgment that could lead them to think the supernatural at work.” But even they may fear Fridays and 13 at table.

Dr Verdo divides charlatans into two classes: the public charlatan and the charlatan in private practice. The public charlatan cries his wares to all and sundry, dresses flashily, and claims to have received the secret of his panacea somewhere in the mystic orient. (I have a wonderful French print from the middle of the 19th century of a man addressing a credulous crowd, claiming to have been the king of Persia’s physician and who offers his balm to the crowd only because it cured everyone in Persia and there was nothing left for him to do there.)

The charlatan in private practice, by contrast, is a self proclaimed specialist, for example in gout or in “an illness of adventurers that I do not want to name” (and that, in our franker age, was once treated in the “special clinic”). Unlike the public charlatan, who revels in the light of day, the charlatan in private practice is a creature of ill lit rooms, decorated in cheap luxury.

Dr Verdo is a realist; he knows that charlatans flourish wherever real doctors have failed, for example in “cancer, scrofula, phthisis, tetanus, croup, whooping cough, gout, rabies, migraine, sea-sickness, epilepsy, rheumatism, asthma, cholera, etc.” This list perhaps explains why a friend of Dr Verdo’s, who was a student with him, gave up medicine for economic reasons and took up lucrative charlatanry.

But for Dr Verdo there is a deeper reason why charlatanry and charlatans always flourish. He begins his book with the words, “The inclination to the marvellous is in human nature itself,” and he ends his book with the words, “Credulity is one of the attributes that distinguishes man from the animals.”

I think this is true because while we fear the unknown we fear the known almost as much, and thus we fly for relief from the one to the other.