Editorial February 21, 1901 Issue

Free Choice of Doctors

Editor

Chicago Chronicle

Another Christian Science healer—this time in Cincinnati—has been acquitted of practising medicine illegally, and this closes the old year with an unbroken series of victories for the "irregulars" over the forces of the recognized schools of medicine. The courts have uniformly decided in favor of the Scientists.

The question has been an interesting one, because it involved something more than a mere dispute between regularly licensed medical practitioners and those who professed to heal disease without the use of drugs. It involved the freedom of the individual. That is to say, it involved the right of a man to call in any one he wanted to and to intrust his health to the care of physicians who acknowledged no allegiance to any medical school. And it is very well that the question has been answered in the affirmative. For if it had been decided that the Christian Scientists, for instance, should not act as physicians, there is no telling when the prohibition might have been extended to some other medical sect, relatively small in numbers, though perhaps fully as efficient as the "regulars" or the homœopaths. Proscription is a dangerous precedent to establish.

So long as his volition does not involve a trespass upon the rights of his fellows, the individual is the supreme and final judge of his own actions. And rightly so.

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