What's the difference between mountebank and quack?

Mountebank


Definition:

  • (n.) One who mounts a bench or stage in the market or other public place, boasts of his skill in curing diseases, and vends medicines which he pretends are infalliable remedies; a quack doctor.
  • (n.) Any boastful or false pretender; a charlatan; a quack.
  • (v. t.) To cheat by boasting and false pretenses; to gull.
  • (v. i.) To play the mountebank.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
  • (2) He was the first and last ophthalmologist to travel from court to court of Europe with a cavalcade of outriders and supporters; and although he was caricatured as a mountebank, there was an element of genius about him, and his innovations, especially in squint surgery, demand that he should not be forgotten.

Quack


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To utter a sound like the cry of a duck.
  • (v. i.) To make vain and loud pretensions; to boast.
  • (v. i.) To act the part of a quack, or pretender.
  • (n.) The cry of the duck, or a sound in imitation of it; a hoarse, quacking noise.
  • (n.) A boastful pretender to medical skill; an empiric; an ignorant practitioner.
  • (n.) Hence, one who boastfully pretends to skill or knowledge of any kind not possessed; a charlatan.
  • (a.) Pertaining to or characterized by, boasting and pretension; used by quacks; pretending to cure diseases; as, a quack medicine; a quack doctor.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The agency has worked with other authorities to move against quack AIDS products and to educate the public concerning this health fraud.FDA hopes that through all these efforts it can help researchers in government, academia, and industry advance the development, testing, and review of safe and effective therapies, preventatives,and diagnostics for AIDS and related conditions.
  • (2) The FPC has neither, so it risks just going quack- quack on a murky pond," he said.
  • (3) Never mind that it muddies the debate (the Le Pen dynasty and the millionaire Nigel Farage somehow turn out to be the real victims in all this) and trivialises the very people to whom the quack is pretending to genuflect.
  • (4) A collection of poems by his widow Karen Green, entitled Bough Down, won praise earlier this year , and Quack This Way , a tribute from his friend Bryan A Garner was published this month.
  • (5) Their ruling will help young people Duncan Smith's department had pushed into quack schemes on pain of losing their benefit.
  • (6) No politician can keep a promise to bring back jobs – especially not Donald Trump Read more Like all good quack analysis, it is instantly digestible, it makes little demands of its audience: no scouring of footnotes nor leafing through history.
  • (7) Brome, western wheat, and quack grasses demonstrated RAST inhibition patterns similar to the northern grasses.
  • (8) Mega-projects have become the quack remedies of modern politics.
  • (9) But it isn't only quack journals that have failures in peer review.
  • (10) We are taught to bark like dogs, quack like ducks around the same time we are learning the words for mummy and daddy.
  • (11) The policy quacks urge us to breezeblock the greenbelt.
  • (12) These objects include radium in devices which were used by legitimate medical practitioners for legitimate medical purposes such as therapy, as well as a wide variety of "quack cures."
  • (13) It was a quick political fix, a quack’s remedy that seemed to deal with the symptoms in the short term when it was really just aggravating the causes.
  • (14) If this is not double-dip recession it is certainly starting to walk, talk and quack like one.
  • (15) State media alleged that in pursuit of profits, Baidu had allowed its online health forums to become “flooded with quacks and advertisements for unlicensed hospitals”.
  • (16) Cue Baxter’s own recollection of her angst about the jab, which concluded with the claim that some parents were “being used by a quack and a fraud”.
  • (17) The structure of sinistrin from red squill (Urginea maritima) was determined by methylation analysis and 13C NMR spectroscopy, using the fructans from Pucinella peisonis and quack-grass (Agropyron repens) as reference substances.
  • (18) George Orwell berated them as "fruit juice drinkers, nudists, sex maniacs, Quakers, nature-cure quacks, pacifists and feminists", while others have, outrageously, labelled them Guardian writers and readers.
  • (19) For Robert De Niro to use the platform of his internationally known film festival to lend credibility to a quack peddling toxic misinformation about autism is, among other things, a flagrant abuse of power and privilege – yes, white power and privilege.
  • (20) He doesn’t look particularly comfortable, writes resident Guardian quack Dr Murray, who has no clue whatsoever if he’s being honest.