376 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
movement inaugurated, it is this one. It is a movement by physicians 
for the reduction of disease, which ipso facto means a movement 
against their financial interests. 
The writer is a member of the regular profession; he nevertheless 
would not wish for a moment to limit the freedom of any citizen to 
choose his physician from some other school or cult, providing the 
individual assuming the function and responsibilities of a physician 
had the training necessary to prevent him from endangering the life 
of his patient by lack of medical knowledge or skill. 
The official mouthpiece of this “National League for Medical 
Freedom ” is Mr. B. 0. Flower, who has had heretofore the reputation 
of a fighter for everything involving the spiritual, social and physical 
progress of humanity, and it is inexplicable to many of his admirers 
how he can lead a movement opposed to the improvement of the 
health of the nation. The vast majority in the ranks of this so-called 
“league,” though they may be well-meaning, noble, and earnest, are 
not men and women who have toiled patiently for years in order to 
acquire the thorough scientific medical training which enables one to 
assume that great responsibility of the care and treatment of the sick. 
They are unable to appreciate the inestimable value of federal help in 
preventing disease. These people are blindly following certain indi- 
viduals who designate the regular profession as a medical trust, and 
accuse the thousands of noble men and women who are devoting their 
lives to the alleviation of human ills of a desire to monopolize medical 
practise. The establishment of a federal department of health would 
mean pure food, pure medicine, control of plagues and epidemics, the 
advancement of medical science and through it the improvement of 
the health and increase of material wealth of the nation. It is said 
that many of the individuals opposing the Owen bill are commercially 
snterested in the manufacture of drugs or patent medicines, of which 
latter the American people swallow about $200,000,000 worth annually. 
Whether it is true or not that the National League for Medical Free- 
dom is backed financially by drug manufacturers and patent medicine 
concerns, I am not prepared to say; yet even these men have nothing 
to fear from a federal department of health if the drugs they put on 
the market are pure and the claims made for patent medicines do not 
delude the public or endanger its health. The element which clamors 
most loudly for medical freedom is composed in many instances of men 
and women who have attended one or two courses of lectures or got 
their “ degrees” without any training at all, and have developed into 
“ doctors” and “healers” in a most remarkably short space of time. 
Because the American Medical Association has always advocated a 
thorough medical education, is pleading constantly for pure drugs, is 
opposed to quackery, patent medicines and nostrums, its 40,000 mem- 
