Article March 30, 1907 Issue

There is pending in the lower house of the State Legislature,...

St. Joseph (Mo.) Gazette

There is pending in the lower house of the State Legislature, the Senate having already passed the measure, a bill designed ostensibly to regulate the practice of medicine and surgery, but in which there is a hidden purpose quietly waiting against the time when the bill shall become a law. The bill was drawn and is being pushed by members of the medical fraternity; who assert that it is for the protection of the public from charlatans and quacks, who under the guise of physicans are constantly preying upon the gullible public. It provides that no one shall practise medicine or surgery in Missouri who has not first secured a license from the State Board of Health, which board is forbidden to grant such a license except to graduates of recognized medical schools. At least no one without such a license as is thus required, may practise either medicine or surgery for fees, while gratuitous treatment of the sick or afflicted is prohibited entirely.

The hidden purpose above referred to has been discovered by the Christian Scientists, who, should the bill become a law, will be prohibited from practising their particular methods of treating the afflicted, without first having been graduated from some medical school recognized by the State Board of Health, and securing a license to practise. There are also other persons, holding similar views in regard to the treatment of the sick or afflicted, who would find themselves in the same fix as our Christian Science friends, the right to use the surgeon's knife, to administer drugs of any character, or to treat the sick in any way, and charge for their services, being limited to graduates of certain schools alone,—a thing that is so preposterous as to be unreasonable in the extreme. There has always been more or less feeling between medical practitioners of the different schools, each holding to the peculiar method of treatment in which he happens to have been educated, and insisting that all others are wrong and should be refused the right to practise. It is to such narrowness and bigotry as this that such measures as the proposed bill must be attributed.

It is proper and right for the State to provide that none but competent persons shall administer drugs or practise the science of surgery. The surgeon's knife as well as most drugs are very dangerous things in the hands of one who does not thoroughly understand their use, and the public should be protected from this sort of quackery by the State. There are, however, a growing number of people in this country who do not believe in the use of drugs at all and who never submit themselves or their friends to the hands of a surgeon. Marvelous results have been secured in the healing of the sick through mental processes, some of our most eminent physicians themselves using drugs as sparingly as possible. Many people have religious views which prevent them from emplying physicians of certain schools, a faith they have a perfect right to follow, so long as they not enforce it upon others. In view of these facts it is not right for the State to compel this class of people to employ physicians from certain recognized medical schools or do without such treatment as they admittedly stand in need of. Limit by the law the right of incompetent persons to prescribe drugs or practise surgery, but in doing so it is not necessary or right to trample upon the rights of those who desire to do neither.

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