Promises, Promises: The Art of Selling Snake Oil
By PETER EDIDIN

PHILADELPHIA - Visitors to great museums of art are liable to be moved in any number of ways by what they see there, but almost never to laughter. This seems a pity; museums regard themselves as educational institutions, and the human condition, after all, is often as funny as it is noble or tragic.

A small exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art subverts high art's often relentless sobriety. "Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera and Books" is a funny and instructive look at four centuries of greed and folly, seen though artistic depictions of medical fraud.

"The quack has always been a popular subject for artists," said John Ittmann, the museum's curator of prints, who helped organized the 75 works in the show, which is on view through June 26. "Back to the Middle Ages, when they showed up at a country fair, everybody came. After all, they were salesmen, pitchmen, who brought their own music makers and clowns and rode in their own caravans. "

"Fair at Impruneta," a large etching from 1620, is by Jacques Callot, whom Mr. Ittmann calls an etcher and engraver of genius. It shows a crowd of perhaps 1,000 people at a town near Florence, Italy. But the viewer's eye is directed to a raised platform in the lower right-hand corner, where a quack ballyhoos his cure-alls assisted by a motley fool holding out a large snake to attract the gullible.

There are works by other famous names on display - William Hogarth, Honoré Daumier and Maxfield Parrish - but the exhibition's strength lies in the ephemera: advertisements, song sheets, political broadsides and other works on paper that were part of the disposable popular culture of the moment.

For example, there is an anonymous 1803 portrait etching, "The Famous Mr. Martin Van Butchell," of a celebrated London quack. A squat little man with a bowlerlike hat, bushy beard and long hair sits astride an equally squat white pony covered with painted purple spots and outfitted with artificial teeth (Van Butchell's specialty). He also had his wife embalmed and placed in a case with a glass lid in his sitting room.

A Dutch print from around 1600, the earliest in the show, depicts a popular cure for mental illness. The quack would make an incision in the scalp and, using sleight of hand, seem to remove disease-causing rocks from the patient's head.

By the 19th century, "Quack, Quack, Quack" demonstrates, the itinerant fraud was giving way to the mass marketer, who used posters, newspapers and other advertising to sell products. Morison's Pills, a powerful vegetable-based laxative, was among the most successful of these enterprises. Customers were told to take as many as they felt necessary - potentially deadly advice - and one satirist showed a man turning into a hybrid vegetable because of them.