286 Thurs and Numbers
community, including the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Jo-
seph Henry, and the director of the United States Coast Survey, Alexander
Dallas Bache, talked about expelling “charlatans” and “quacks” from the
scientifi c world.^14 Indeed, by far the most common term for error in the
guise of science was quackery. Quackery was particularly common in dis-
cussions of medicine but the scope of the category was not tightly linked
to the medical or scientifi c alone. The defi nition offered by English physi-
cian Samuel Parr, as paraphrased by the American anti- quackery crusader
David Meredith Reese, identifi ed “every practitioner, whether educated
or not, who attempts to practise imposture of any kind” as a quack. And
though Reese noted in his Humbugs of New- York (1838) that the “epithet
is often restricted within narrow limits, and is attached ordinarily only to
those ignorant and impudent mountebanks, who, for purposes of gain,
make pretensions to the healing art,” he included abolitionism within the
sphere of humbuggery.^15
Likewise, many Americans offered broad defi nitions of the pseudo-
scientifi c that did little more than identify it with pretensions to an un-
warranted scientifi c status. Astrology and alchemy were two widely used
historical examples of pseudoscience because they resembled actual sci-
ences in name, but were not, or so it was universally assumed, truly scien-
tifi c. When it came to explaining pretension, some people focused on the
“servile sophistry of pseudo- science” and on the perversion of legitimate
scientifi c terminology.^16 An 1852 article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
decried the “dextrous use of some one long new- coined term.”^17 Such
verbiage was another widely recognized sign of pseudoscience, as was
the tendency to theorize too quickly or leap to conclusions “in lieu of
proof.”^18 In other cases, observers attributed false claims cloaked in sci-
ence to ethical lapses. To such leading American men of science as Henry
and Bache, moral fi ber was an essential possession of the true scientifi c
practitioner.^19
This lack of specifi city paralleled the fuzziness of science itself. At the
same time, there were some emerging ideas about the nature of pseudo-
science, quackery, charlatanism, or mountebankery applied specifi cally
to scientifi c matters that were beginning to draw lines between science
and not- science in new and ultimately modern- sounding ways. For in-
stance, one antebellum characteristic of pretense in the scientifi c or medi-
cal worlds was the improper infl uence of the hope for material gain. Both
David Meredith Reese and Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed to the corrupt-
ing infl uence of money in the creation and diffusion of quackery and
pseudoscience.^20 Such claims helped to create a zone of pure scientifi c
knowledge or medical practice.