Medical Encroachment

Archibald McLellan

Within the past few years propaganda in behalf of enforced medical inspection and medical control of the people has assumed such proportions and developed such arrogant disregard of personal rights, as to call forth protest from even those who believe in medical practice. A case in point is the following editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle:—

Zeal for the protection of the public health is spreading at a prodigious rate, and people are astonished and shocked to learn that go where they may and do what they may they cannot escape the risk of deadly disease. The friend's hand which you so cordially shake when you meet him may just have left a strap of an overcrowded street-car, from which it conveys to you the germs of all known communicable diseases. There is no better means of assuring a universal commingling than the support of a street-car strap hanger.

Apparently, the only real assurance against contagion is the permanent isolation of everybody. Or, as an alternative measure, the laws may require that a fumigating closet be constructed in each building, wherein everybody shall fumigate himself before meeting anybody else, the doctors only being allowed to roam at large.

A good many are considering whether it is all worth while. Why should one wish to live if in order to do so one must omit all that makes life worth living? Some are coming to think that the fear of disease will do more to shorten life than the diseases themselves.

For years the medical profession has protested against the minute detailing of symptoms in patent medicine advertisements as calculated to induce disease in healthy persons who read them—if healthy persons do read them. But never in the worse days of soul-harrowing medical advertisements was there so much to terrify as in the common every-day reports of meetings of boards of health and medical conventions.

It would seem that the more one knows the more miserable he must be.

This so-called health propaganda has used the fear of disease as its chief weapon, and has done much harm by instilling this fear into the minds of people who have been taught to accept as final and not to be questioned the verdict of physicians, either individually or collectively. We do not mean by this that all physicians have indulged in this practice of frightening the people, but their spokesmen, whether self-appointed or not, seem to have given this impression with the sanction and the approval of both local and national medical societies. The wrong that is being done in this way is more far-reaching than is generally understood, and it is time that something more than mere sarcastic protest on the part of a few newspapers should be depended upon to turn back the tide of medical encroachment.

In the mean time the public should realize that enforced medical inspection has passed to such a stage that it is now being followed by a demand for enforced medical treatment. In view of this threatened abrogation of individual rights, it seems pertinent to inquire into the supposed infallibility of medical practice. When we do this we find that leading physicians are admitting that practically half of hospital diagnoses are wrong, that many diseases are considered incurable by any means known to medical practice, and that—occasionally at least—after medicine has failed even to relieve these so-called "incurable" diseases the patients have, despite medical pronouncement, regained normal health.

Certainly such facts as these do not justify the public in putting its rights and its liberties so unreservedly in the hands of the medical profession as is demanded by its spokesmen, especially since the history of the practice of medicine is very largely that of loudly heralded certainties which within a very few years, and sometimes within a few months, have proved to be nothing more than unsuccessful experiments. The practice of medicine, and even the professional theories in relation to the cause and nature of disease, are not the same today as they were but a few years ago, and unless the history of medical practice in the future differs radically from what it has been in the past, the practice and theories of today will soon be discarded for still other beliefs and practices.

In the mean time there has been a revival of Christian healing through Christian Science, which has proved that there is a scientific means of overcoming disease without the use of drugs or other material remedies. Thousands of persons are being healed by this system who would be denied the right of choice should enforced medical treatment become the law. If this is permitted, who will venture to say how long it will be until compulsory conformity to some particular form of religion will be again revived!

Archibald McLellan.

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The Heart of Things

October 23, 1915

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