NOVEMBEB 11, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



665 



wholly without or with inadequate medical 

 training." As a consequence of this changed 

 relation, Dr. Taj'lor says that the profession 

 stands at a parting of the ways, and he asks, 

 " WUl it proceed, fenced in by conventionality 

 and the traditions of the past, or will it re- 

 spond to the insistent demands of the times 

 and widen its sphere of activity ? " 



As a natural extension of this " letting in 

 of the light," the public has become increas- 

 ingly interested in medical affairs. Public lec- 

 tures are given, and magazine articles for 

 popular reading are printed, on the greatest 

 variety of medical topics. Concerning these 

 Dr. Taylor says that it is a striking sign of a 

 changed attitude that not many years ago any 

 popular exposition of medicine by a physician 

 was looked upon as a doubtful procedure, in- 

 dicative of personal self-interest. This narrow 

 state of mind, he says, is happily past, and he 

 looks for the development of a useful, if small, 

 number of physicians who have the capacity 

 and inclination to widen the scope of medicine 

 by these means. 



The entering wedge of this movement, how- 

 ever. Dr. Taylor considers to have been the 

 campaign against tuberculosis. He quotes 

 Professor Osier as having said that tubercu- 

 losis was no longer a medical, but a social, 

 problem. A recent tuberculosis exhibition in 

 New York had an attendance of 750,000 

 people, and these figures have been approached 

 in many smaller cities throughout the United 

 States. In this campaign against tuberculosis 

 the profession has enlisted not only the sym- 

 pathy and practical support of the public, but 

 its active cooperation. 



In America, Dr. Taylor cites also the devel- 

 opment of " social service " as one of the most 

 significant features of the widening of -med- 

 ical activity. Beginning some years ago in 

 the Massachusetts General Hospital, and since 

 adopted at a number of institutions in Boston, 

 departments have been formed for the purpose 

 of studying the underlying causes of disease 

 and the social problems connected therewith, 

 through the agency of trained workers under 

 medical direction. The abandoning of secrecy, 

 the shifting of medicine from an empiric basis 



to one founded on scientific conclusions drawn 

 from data accessible to every one, and the en- 

 listment of the public in many medical activi- 

 ties is making the profession less and less a 

 closed body of experts who, to quote a letter 

 which appeared in the Journal of August 20, 

 " practise medicine as between man and man, 

 accepting individual responsibility and accept- 

 ing individual reward," and more and more 

 an organized department of public and social 

 service, with ramifications extending in every 

 direction. 



This change is naturally not without its 

 attendant disadvantages. The response to the 

 public demand for information has not always 

 been wise either in matter or form ; the writers 

 of popular treatises have too often provided 

 empty dogma in place of proved fact ; the sus- 

 ceptibility of the public mind to the potent 

 influences of suggestion has at times been 

 overlooked, and in one important department, 

 that of psychotherapy, the public has been left 

 largely to its own devices, to become the vic- 

 tims of Christian Scientists and other dabblers 

 in the occult, or, occasionally, the sacrificial 

 offerings of well-intentioned but misguided 

 clergymen. 



A field grows at its fringes, and it is here 

 that the weeds abound. As a recent corre- 

 spondence in our columns wiU show, the sphere 

 of '■' spiritual " or " mental " healing is at 

 times, and quite erroneously, supposed to be a 

 kind of " no man's land." Such a designation 

 can not be too strongly rebutted. What usu- 

 ally passes under the name of " spiritual heal- 

 ing " is at bottom — unless it be miraculous — 

 nothing other than treatment by suggestion, a 

 department appertaining solely to medicine, 

 and one to be undertaken by no one unless 

 specially conversant with psycho-analytic and 

 psycho-therapeutic methods. Surely the 

 clergyman who undertakes the spiritual heal- 

 ing of diseases — such as, for example, myas- 

 thenia gravis — does not realize the loss he and 

 his patients suffer by his exchanging his hon- 

 orable calling for another in which he has no 

 proper training. Doubtless, as Dr. William 

 Salmon says in his " Ars Chirurgica " (Lon- 

 don, 169S), there have always been those who. 



