Article September 9, 1911 Issue

Even after the monopoly or trust-seeking doctors had...

B. O. Flower

Twentieth Century Magazine

Even after the monopoly or trust-seeking doctors had commenced their campaign against those who employed external methods in the treatment of disease, they disavowed all desire to interfere with the freedom of the people in the treatment of disease, if the healing was a part of their religious convictions, or to interfere with those who practised such treatment as a part of their religious belief, unless they administered deadly drugs. Here again, under freedom, a mighty revolution in therapeutic theories has resulted, and hundreds of thousands of cures of the sick who in a large number of instances had been pronounced victims of supposedly incurable diseases by the flower of the medical profession, have resulted in seriously diminishing the revenues of the drug-dispensing doctors.

What is even quite as significant, and for the well-being of civilization of far greater moment, is the fact that the cures effected by the chief representatives of this newer treatment have been accomplished through a direct appeal to the spiritual nature that has resulted in moral reformation as well as physical cure. The older treatments have left the invalid where they found him; the newer treatment, in most cases by awakening his moral nature, has led him from sensuous or sensual domination to spiritual supremacy. And so great have been the physical healings that the trust-seeking doctors are now as thoroughly alarmed as were the image-makers of Ephesus when through the preaching of the apostles the supremacy of Diana was menaced. Hence they have formed a mighty nation-wide political machine or organization, and are advancing along three definite lines in order to gain absolute monopoly of the healing art. From the Atlantic to the Pacific in various states they are seeking to obtain greater legislative protection for themselves—protection that will place the pocket-books and bodies of the people more completely at their mercy. At the same time they are striving to secure national legislation on the one hand, while endeavoring to fasten on the tax-payers a vast army of fear-creating, state-salaried medical inspectors who will virtually be drummers for the protected doctors.

Do you question this? Let me give you one illustrative fact. The report of the department of health for New York city, published in 1909, declares that 323.344 school children were examined during the preceding official year, of whom 242,048 needed medical or surgical treatment. Only 181,296 children out of 323,344, according to these disease-hunting medical inspectors, should not be turned over to the fee-seeking empirical doctors. Think of the result of having an army of 242,048 children turned over to the experimentation of doctors, a large number of whose theories are constantly changing, and having their minds filled with fear while the pocket-books of their parents are being depleted.

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