Article June 19, 1915 Issue

Although the word blasphemous has been used before in...

Judge Clifford P. Smith

Quincy (Mass.) Ledger

Although the word blasphemous has been used before in support of strongly felt but ill-considered reasons for disapproval, your recent editorial headed "A Blasphemous Slur" must have put this epithet into a new setting. Properly used to mean "intentional indignity offered to God or sacred things," the word blasphemy had been, of course, loosely used before your editorial appeared; but never until now has any one become so thoroughly imbued with a reverential belief in material medicine as to utter the word blasphemous in its behalf. From now on, evidently, one must count the medical system among the "sacred things" of which it is blasphemous to speak without due respect.

You must admit, however, if you have frequently read The Christian Science Monitor, that it has not always spoken with entire disrespect for the achievements of those who have endeavored to develop and apply the practice of medicine and surgery. It has never aimed to do so. Indeed, the editorial in the Monitor which incurred your disapproval was not designed to be an attack on medicine or the medical profession. The editorial which you regarded as blasphemous was simply designed to be a protest against what some doctors are doing in the name of the American Medical Association, —a protest against a monopoly which is not desired by many of the most representative members of the medical profession, —and to be a defense of human rights.

Whether The Christian Science Monitor would strike a just or generous balance between the two sides of the account, if it should review and estimate what the medical profession has done, or has been unable to do, for the promotion of health, cannot be determined from the editorial which you have so violently condemned; for it did not undertake to do this. It is fairly certain, however, that not even the official organ of the American Medical Association would contend that the score of items which you have named would fairly present the balance between achievement and failure. Indeed, the largest item in your account —the building of the Panama canal —can be credited to medical science only by ignoring the difference between a medical doctor and a sanitary engineer. Medicine doubtless did a considerable work at Panama; so did nursing; and so did Christian Science.

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