Article September 8, 1906 Issue

If a physician is competent to judge and testify "that...

Rosemary O. Anderson

Hartford (Conn.) Courant

If a physician is competent to judge and testify "that if proper medical aid had been called in time, the patient could have been saved"—how does he recognize the critical moment? And when is the proper time? And is not then a physician guilty of manslaughter when a patient dies who has been under his treatment from the incipiency of the case to its fatal termination? How did the proper moment escape his attention? And why did he fail to administer the proper treatment? These are questions of grave import, for if the physician's claim is based on facts, there is something to be accounted for in the seeming neglect of medical practice. If there is no foundation in fact, then such testimony should not be permitted, since it is speculative and unreliable, and would be barred as relating to any other case in a court of equity.

The purpose of this reasoning is not to traduce the medical schools but to show how unreasoning and how inexact is the conclusion that dependence upon any healing but that offered by medicine is criminal neglect. If medicine healed all the cases treated, then resort to other systems less perfect would be criminal; but such is not the case.

People are educated to believe that nothing but drugs can cure disease; that you must try drugs, and if they fail there is no hope for you. On the other hand, human life is problematical, and all the research in the biological laboratory and all the studies of the medical men have failed to reveal the nature or origin of life, or the nature and origin of disease. Physicians will admit that the primary cause of disease is absolutely unknown, and yet we are taught to believe about this very vaguely understood experience called disease that nothing but matter will heal it, and that you are a criminal if you try anything else.

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