Article October 24, 1914 Issue

When the reverend gentleman quoted in a recent Journal...

Paul Stark Seeley

Portland (Ore.) Journal

When the reverend gentleman quoted in a recent Journal addressed his congregation in behalf of a national department of public health, his remarks were undoubtedly well intentioned. When, however, he characterized the objectors to such a department as the "misguided opposition," and alleged that certain beliefs, held by the opposition had become a "national menace," he permitted his zeal to outrun his wisdom, and this led him to be more generous with his allegations than he could be with his proof.

The public, in seeking to reach a correct conclusion as to the need of a national health department, will remember that it is already paying for city, county, and state boards of health, together with a national public health service costing more than twenty million dollars a year, a service declared by competent physicians to be entirely adequate to carry on all the health activities with the jurisdiction of the federal government. The proposed department has been conceived, nurtured, and urged upon Congress for many years by the American Medical Association, composed of thousands of "regular" doctors. Its ultimate object, as proved by the evidence in the Congressional Record, is to place the allopathic school of medicine in control of the nation's health activities and bring the country's citizenship under the rules and surveillance of an army of "regular" physicians, whose medical opinions would be given the force of law. A great saving in life and dollars is the promise held out for this inroad on the national treasury and the accompanying invasion upon the rights of the individual. This promise, in the light of the multitude of medical failures and mistakes, seems a shaky base for setting up a national medical oligarchy clothed with governmental sanction and bolstered with legislative enactment.

The American Medical Association, whose well-organized political and publicity machinery is furnishing the dynamics for advocating the proposed department, has been for years a power in state and national politics. At its behest, legislatures have passed laws restricting other systems of medical practice. Illiberality and intolerance have marked its whole policy when once in a place of power. Practitioners of other schools have been treated as charlatans and persecuted as criminals. The association's endeavor has always been to strengthen by law its ever shifting theories, and to establish, in so far as the public would permit, a medical monopoly. What it has done or tried to do in the states, it seems logical presume it would try to do when entrenched behind federal law, its many protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

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