Article March 30, 1907 Issue

Physicians seem to be of all persons most jealous of...

Puyallup (Wash.) Tribune

Physicians seem to be of all persons most jealous of their rights. This is well enough until they attempt to hedge themselves about with special privileges supposed to be conferred by diplomas given from certain schools. Now, in point of fact, as one contemporary correctly puts it. no one man knows, and no set of men know, all that there is in the wide world of science as applied to the alleviation of physical ills. Hence, when a man with rising choler and bitter denunciation seeks to prevent others who do not see things as he sees them in the realm of therapeutics, from practising the science of healing, either by the administration of drugs, by manipulation of the patient's body, by a system of dietetics, or by the process known as mental healing, he assumes an attitude of. intolerance and of persecution that is wholly at variance with the enlightened spirit of the age. Patients die under all manner of medical and so-called scientific treatment. Why concern ourselves more earnestly about the child that dies without medicine than about' the child who was given bitter and nauseous potions as long as it could swallow? Or why gird at the man or woman as a quack who does not succeed in rubbing pain and disease away, and laud as a skilful practitioner the man or woman who has experimented in vain in materia medica for a remedy that would restore the patient to health?

Surgery claims to be an exact science, and the skill of the man who practises it should be judged according to the most rigid standards of surgical knowledge: medicine, on the other hand, is but a series of experiments, some of which apparently succeed, but many of which signally fail to bring relief and restore the patient to health. Of course certain facts have been established by long juggling in the realm of experiment. Cathartics and emetics and lethal drugs usually do what is expected of them ; but beyond this, absolute results cannot lie promised. This being true, the doctor who calls any system of treating the sick — except his own—"quackery." and the death of a patient who was not treated according to a certain formula "murder," is manifestly more concerned for the infallibility of 'his profession than for the public weal. And when he appeals with denunciatory language to the law-making body to place Christian Scientists under the ban of the law. he assumes before the world the pose of the dogmatist rather than that of the humanitarian. The editor of this paper is not a Christian Scientist, nor is he a dogmatist as to any other system of mental or physical healing. Many are helped by Christian Science. As much may be affirmed as to the efficacy of several other methods of treatment. More cannot be affirmed: and of some not as much. They all have their virtues—some, more; some, less.

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