Article February 16, 1907 Issue

If, as some of your correspondents aver, medical science...

The Evening Sun

If, as some of your correspondents aver, medical science has been advanced and suffering reduced by discoveries made in connection with vivisection, why is there such a wide difference of opinion in the minds of our best physicians and surgeons on this topic? Indeed, why do so many of our best students of medicine insist that no advance has been made in the past hundred years. The venerable Dr. Alexander said recently to his class in the New York College, that "with all our boasted improvements in medical discovery there is as much suffering to-day as there was thirty years ago." This is the face of newer antiseptics, cocaine, morphia, etc.

In The Evening Sun of yesterday there is a sample of the advance we have made in materia medica [sic] in the item headed "Rabies or Opium," reporting the case of one Louis Schmidt, seventeen years old, who died, according to some physicians from Bellevue, of rabies; others diagnosed the disease as opium poisoning, and a report in another paper gave a physician's opinion as stating it was excessive cigarette smoking.

Dr. E. R. Wardell, a practising physician of this city, in delivering an address in this city last Tuesday, is reported as having made the positive statement that cancer was caused by worry, and that other mental qualities like fear, hate, or anger were known to paralyze the nerves and actually poison the blood and cause any loathsome disease, even cause death. If doctors who have proved this are among the sane and reputable practitioners of this and every city, for what are they searching by vivisection? Many physicians concur in Dr. Wardell's opinion and many disagree. There seems to be no positive agreement among physicians on any disease, cure, diagnosis, treatment, or cause. New "cures" come up so fast for our diseases we can't discard the old "positive cures" fast enough. Then we read of "diphtheria" cases, so diagnosed and confirmed by microscopic test, turning out to be a pin in the throat, as recently appeared in the case of a little girl, Margaret Curl, in the Bronx; of healthy little children vaccinated and dying in fifteen minutes. With the science of medicine over four thousand years old, and not one positive cure for any one of our diseases which any school of medicine will guarantee, is it any wonder the public questions the advisability of granting unusual powers by our legislatures to physicians and are growing more skeptical of the worth of any or all medicines? Is it not getting back to the opinions expressed by such famous students of medicine and surgery' as Dr. Benjamin Rush, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, Dr. James Johnson, Dr. Mason Good, Dr. Chapman, Sir John Forbes, who after long years of practice, observation, and reflection, conscientiously state, in effect, that "if there were not a single physician, surgeon, apothecary, chemist, druggist, or drug on the face of the earth, there would be less disease and less mortality"?

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