When you consider that thousands of Osteopaths (yes, there are several thousand of them in the field treating the people) are buying some one of the various Osteopathic journals by the hundreds every month and distributing them gratis to the people until the whole country is literally saturated, and that other cults are almost as busy disseminating their literature, do you wonder that the people are getting biased notions of the medical profession in general and the American Medical Association in particular? While my faith in the integrity and efficacy of the “new school” remained intact and at a fanatical pitch, my sympathy was with the “independent” journals. The doctrine of “therapeutic liberty” seemed a fair one, and one that was only American. After studying both sides, and comparing the journals, I have commenced to wonder if the man who preaches universal liberty so strenuously is not, in most cases, only working for individual license.
I wrote a paper some time ago, out of which this booklet has grown, and sent it to the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. He was kind enough to say it was full of “severe truth” that should be published to the laity. In that paper I diagnosed the therapeutic situation of to-day as a “deplorable muddle,” and I am glad to have my diagnosis confirmed by a prominent writer in the Journal of the Association. He says:
“Therapeutics to-day cannot be called a science, it can only be called a confusion. With a dozen dissenting opinions as to the most essential and efficacious therapeutic agents inside the school, and a horde of new school pretenders outside, each with his own little system that he heralds as the best and only right way, and all these separated in everything but their attack on the regulars, there certainly is a ‘turbidity of therapeutics!’”
And this therapeutic stream is the one that flows for the “healing of nations!” Should not its waters be pure and uncontaminated, so that the invalid who thirsts for health may drink with confidence in their healing virtues?
If the stream shows turbid to the physician, how must it appear to his patient as he stands upon the shore and sees conflicting currents boil and swirl in fierce contention, forming eddies that are continually stranding poor devils on the drifts of discarded remedies, while streams of murky waters (new schools) pour in from every side and add their filth. To the patient it becomes “confusion, worse confounded.”
CHAPTER II.
GRAFT AND FAILUREPHOBIA.
The Commercial Spirit—Commercialism in Medicine—Stock Company Medical Colleges—Graft in Medicines, Drugs and Nostrums—Encyclopedia Graft—“Get-Rich-Quick” Propositions—Paradoxes in Character of Shysters—Money Madness—Professional Failurephobia—The Fortunate Few and the Unfortunate Many—A Cause of Quackery—The Grafter’s Herald—The World’s Standard—Solitary Confinement—The Prisoner’s Dream—Working up a Cough—Situation Appalling Among St. Louis Physicians—A Moral Pointed.