Article February 9, 1899 Issue

Cullings from the News Letter

We have been forwarded a bill which is now pending in the legislature of the State of Texas, regulating the practice of medicine, so-called. The Medical Trust in that state, not being satisfied to control the action of those who practise medicine, has gone farther and entered into the domain of thought, and seeks to control by legislative enactment the actions of all who attempt, directly or indirectly, by "medicine, mind, or otherwise, to heal the sick." This means that if a person should pray to God for the recovery of the sick, that person will be amenable to the laws of Texas and subject to fine and imprisonment for thus invoking the aid of Deity.

Texas is a grand state and, with its thirteen representatives in the lower house and two in the upper house of Congress at this capital, presents a spectacle of which any person might justly be proud. Many of her representatives here are men of more than ordinary ability, gentlemen of wide understanding, comprehensive learning, broad statesmanship, and they are a credit to the government of the United States, of whose law-making power they form a part. Texas, heretofore, has proven too liberal, too broad, and too just to allow the Medical Trust to take possession of its law-makers, and it has not as yet been able to bribe, intimidate, or control the legislature of that state to the extent of obtaining prohibitive, un-Christian, and unconstitutional laws regarding the practice of medicine, and it is now believed by those who are informed that the passage of such a bill as is pending before the legislature is an impossibility, because of the superior enlightenment, statesmanship, and fairness of the people and the members of the legislature of that state.

When a profession becomes so far degenerate or in such straits as to solicit the passage of laws prohibiting the worship of God in accordance with those rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States and of the different states, it is time for that profession to die. The practice of medicine is a rank farce, bound up in ignorance and superstition.

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