Quacks, charlatans, and mountebanks appear often in European paintings and prints between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. This Dutch genre painting depicts a quack cutting a stone from the head of a patient. This operation to remove the “stone of folly” symbolized a cure for foolishness and gullibility.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Image featured in Discovering Quacks, Utopias, and Cemeteries: Modern Lessons from Historical Themes by Cynthia Resor