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. Such is the weakness and easy credulity of men, that a mountebank ... is preferred before an able physician. Whitlock.
Any boastful or false pretender; a charlatan; a quack. Nothing so impossible in nature but mountebanks will undertake. Arbuthnot.
To cheat by boasting and false pretenses; to gull. [R.] Shak.
To play the mountebank.
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