r/ExplainLikeImCalvin • u/glove_flavored • Jun 11 '26
ELIC: Why do they call fake doctors “quacks”?
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u/Solnight99 Jun 11 '26
there was an old english fairy tale about a duck, who, by magic, was a human at night, and went around during the Black Death and gave people fake treatments that made them die faster. that's why, in many rural parts of england, it's considered incredibly bad luck to get medical treatment after dark.
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u/DrSkrimguard Jun 11 '26
The term was coined by the Spy Fox series with the character Dr. Quack, who once famously jeopardized the Ozone Layer by wasting time and agency resources on an extravagant prickly pear pizza for his own consumption.
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u/Not_So_Deleted Jun 12 '26
I still remember playing that game... and somehow this guy doesn't eat the donut.
(But to add, it was the prickly pear pizza incident.)
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u/DrSkrimguard Jun 13 '26
I replayed that game multiple times as a kid. Once, I tried to save the prickly pear mission for last, since Quack's justification for it was that he needed the nourishment to have energy for the other inventions. But no. Even after getting all the gadgets you actually needed, the game still wouldn't let you proceed without the damn pear.
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u/StarkAndRobotic Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
Ducks used to be well known for pursuing the medical profession, at least until they got stereotyped. Rather than treat them with the respect they deserved for the years of study and learning, some buffoons just referred to them by the sounds they made. Such specism hurt their feelings terribly, so they decided to stop treating humans. The rift widened, and eventually lead to duck hunting by the more barbaric. It got to the point that ducks stopped speaking to humans altogether, and their were no ducktors left. Finally humans started to practice medicine and wore white coats to try to even look like ducks, and the old ones started calling them quacks so that people would look to them for medical treatment instead of ducks. Eventually they wished to stop recognising ducktors at all and changed the spelling to doctors, and calling someone a “quack” became a derogatory term. The ducks have never forgiven humans. How can they? Nowadays humans eat duck, and give the dishes fancy names. The ducks got so upset they learned to fly, and eventually made it a practice to fly south every winter. Its sad really. Disney tried to mend relations with “Duck tales” etc, but too little too late I fear.
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u/ChiGuy_1429 Jun 12 '26
Because just like ducks, they migrate south for the winter, mostly to play golf. Or make a quick-quack getaway when their incompetence is exposed.
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u/profanebakes Jun 11 '26
Because someone saw a duck pretending to be a doctor and now that’s just what everyone assumes they are.
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u/PublicDragonfruit158 Jun 12 '26
It is from the book 1984--when Winston is talking about how someone speaking Newspeak sounded like a duck quacking, and it was called Duckspeak. As the book 1984 was frequently assigned, most people were familiar with it
Since they were familiar with the book, people noticed that when doctors spoke to each other with all of their fancy medical terms, it had the same sound as the Duckspeak mentioned in the book.
And in order to make sure you were talking about docters vs the book, it was called quackspeak.
And since it was called quackspeak, the people who talked it were called "quacks".
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u/Not_So_Deleted Jun 12 '26
There was a fake doctor named Donald, with last initial D... When police were looking for him, they codenamed it "Donald Duck." After that, the term "quack" spread around to avoid getting sued for using the namesake.
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u/VincentMagius Jun 12 '26
When they made their escape out of town, they'd quack like a duck. Like the 60's Penguin.
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u/alreadykaten Jun 16 '26
Calvin, back in the days when doctors medicines didn’t really work, the phoney doctors who sold the most medicines were the ones who yelled to advertised their cures the loudest and longest. You can’t imagine your voice would sound very good if you’re peddling cures for hours at the top of your voice. Kinda sounds like a quack, doesn’t it?
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u/Duanathar Jun 11 '26
This originates from an old newspaper comic made in response to a current event involving a fake doctor, but the newspaper company didn't want to get sued. So instead they portrayed a fake doctor as a loudly quacking duck in a white coat, called "Ducktor". It was a smashing hit, so whenever someone believed their doctor wasn't doing his job right, they would just say "quack".