October 13, 1922] 



SCIENCE 



407 



ingly — ■will. He enters the public's life 

 through an individual's need of him; and in 

 the crises of life — birth, fear, despair and 

 death. Disease may be objective but its effects 

 are all subjective. Through his understanding 

 of the individual in these circumstances has 

 come the reward of individual trust; and it is 

 this confidence multiplied which constitutes the 

 public esteem in which the doctor lives. To 

 think that such can be built up throiigh massed 

 professional activity is idle. 



When will we get a secretary of medicine in 

 the cabinet? Never through a lobby but when 

 someone politically powerful transposes the 

 personal faith he feels in his body physician 

 into political action. We may get him any 

 day that an occupant of the White House 

 trusts adequately the mind and heart of his 

 doctor. This is the manner of men. Not so 

 long ago another follower of the "regular" 

 school asked me why one of our intelligent citi- 

 zens threw his whole energies into the cause of 

 homeopatiiy. I ventured the easy answer that 

 his family doctor was homeopathist, and more 

 — that as a man this doctor was no mean per- 

 sonality. 



Ill 



If the medical profession has problems it is 

 because it has either voluntarily relincjuished 

 what it should have held or done badly what 

 others have done better. Each of these head- 

 ings has subheadings of a legitimate and an 

 illegitimate type. The picture of my old doe- 

 tor friend jogging along in his buggy in the 

 hours after midnight, responsive to a charity 

 call registered through a telephone which he 

 had himself installed in the home of his patient 

 is all too rare. I inquired why he had not sent 

 his younger colleague. He answered that he 

 could not ask an assistant to rise in the night 

 and work without material recompense. The 

 young doctors do not nowadays follow the sick 

 poor of our hospitals to their homes. The 

 social service workers do this and the human 

 aspects of the problems of disease are to-day 

 more commonly touched iby the educated nurse 

 than by medicine's new generation. But if 

 these things be so, is it any wonder that the 

 sum total of patients which constitutes our 

 public is ibecoming increasingly deaf to sugges- 



tions which spring from the medical profes- 

 sion and increasingly responsive to those 

 emanating from social uijlifters or economic 

 and political reformers? 



I venture to add that we do not know 

 enough. For more than a decade now the non- 

 medical psychologists have been able to tell us 

 more of the rank of our mental defectives than 

 we ourselves knew; the graduates of domestic 

 science schools have known more of food values 

 than ninety-nine of a hundred doctors; and 

 laboratory technicians in X-ray work and the 

 simplest biochemical tests have become the 

 interpreters to the profession of the things 

 Avhich it should know itself. If the medical 

 man still feels that he is set apart to teach 

 these things, he must be securer in his Icnowl- 

 edge of the fundamentals. 



From an illegitimate side, the doctor's calling 

 has been placed in parallel with the caricatures 

 and fragments of medical thought represented 

 in Christian Science, osteopathy and ehiro- 

 praetice. There has been much scramble to 

 keep these things in their proper places through 

 the political seesawing of legislative groups 

 inclined to listen at one time to the doctors and 

 at another to the toredoes. The answer should 

 be simple. Why does the doctor ever acknowl- 

 edge these as competitors'? Have they a better 

 knowledge of the principles of medicine and 

 surgery? Or need there be envy that chicane 

 so often pays better than honesty? It will be 

 argued that the public does not know enough 

 and that it must be protected. This has been 

 the cry of autocrats since the stork ruled the 

 frogs. What is at stake is the question of our 

 fundamental faith in democracy. In brutal 

 terms, our average fourteen-year-old intelli- 

 gence is asked to decide whether it will learn 

 or die. For myself, I have little faith in the 

 moral or mental merits of a people which in 

 law buttress the one with the virtue of jails 

 and the other by a superimposed intelligence. 

 The superiority of a people is to be measured 

 iby its ability to withstand temptation and not 

 by the number of its prohibitory laws which 

 makes a going- wrong Lmj)ossible; nor is its 

 superiority proclaimed by an absence of quack 

 solutions but by its clearness of intellect which 

 permits it to distinguish these from better ones. 



