Hey Presto!: Swift and the Quacks

In Hey Presto! Swift and the Quacks, Hugh Ormsby-Lennon reveals how medicine shows, both ancient and modern, galvanized Jonathan Swift's imagination and inspired his wittiest satiric voices. Swift dubbed these multifaceted traveling entertainments his Stage-itinerant or "Mountebank's Stage." In the course of arguing that the stage-itinerant formed an irresistible model for A Tale of a Tub, Ormsby-Lennon also surmises that the mountebank's stage will disclose that missing link, long sought, that connects the twin objects of Swift's ire: gross corruptions in both Religion and Learning.