William Hogarth, The Company of Undertakers

Doctors get a lot of flak, surpassed only by the invectives hurled at lawyers. Though any man, in any trade, has it within himself to become a total scoundrel, I suspect that the quacks and the shysters have targets painted on their backs, because their vocations ought to be so noble, and yet far too many of them are instead seduced by fortune and fame. 

Did you honestly think those mercenary mothers nagged their daughters to marry a surgeon on account of  the rich moral lives they would surely share together? 

In my own neck of the woods, I can confirm that academics are just as likely to be vainglorious blowhards, but the difference is that only other academics will bother to notice. Furthermore, an incompetent plumber will quickly lose his customers, while an incompetent doctor can still hide behind the magnificent appearance of his profession. 

When students see this work by Hogarth, their first reaction is invariably to comment on how ignorant people were back then, and how blessed we are to now be so scientifically enlightened. I encourage them to see the human condition more broadly, and to recognize how charlatans can be found in any time or place, but they remain convinced that modern medicine can do no wrong. I fear some of them will learn otherwise, sooner rather than later. 

Of all the parish priests I had in my adult years, only one stood out as a man of true faith, and the rest were abusers or frauds. Similarly, of all the doctors who ever treated my family, only one was a true healer, and the rest left us both sicker and poorer. You can counter with your clever statistics, and I will rely on my education from the school of hard knocks. I will leave it at that. . . . 

Hogarth presents his doctors in a caricature of a coat of arms, with three infamous snake oil peddlers of his time on the top—John Taylor, Sarah Mapp, and Joshua Ward—and a dozen "reputable" physicians below them. The "quack-heads" and the "cane-heads" differ only by their professional trappings. In modern terms, one dispenses his cures from a storefront in a seedy strip mall, while the other receives junkets from the pharmaceutical corporations. 

The description further mocks their posturing with the refined language of heraldry: 

The company of undertakers beareth, sable, a urinal, proper, between twelve quack-heads of the second, and twelve cane-heads, or consultant. On a chief, nebulae, ermine, one complete doctor, issuant, checkie, sustaining, in his right hand, a baton of the second. On his dexter and sinister sides two demi-doctors, issuant, of the second, and two cane-heads, issuant of the third; the first having one eye, couchant, towards the dexter side of the escutcheon; the second, faced, per pale, proper, and gules guardant. With this motto—Et plurima mortis imago. 

"And many are the faces of death." 

William Hogarth, A Consultation of Physicians, or the Company of Undertakers (1736)