Article August 19, 1916 Issue

The suggestion of the American Medical Association for...

St. Joseph (Mo.) Gazette

The suggestion of the American Medical Association for a Federal "board of medical licensure" should be carefully gone into by the people generally. Whatever measures intended to regulate medical practice may be enacted by state or national legislatures are of deep interest to the public, for it is the public which is affected. Even the wisest of medical practitioners may not be trusted to plan always those things for the people which the people desire.

We are taking precious little medicine these days. The doctor sells none at all, and the druggist only a small part of what his professional brethren of a generation ago disposed of yearly. The people are taking air and exercise in large doses, and nostrums by the absent treatment chiefly. The people, moreover, are feeling very well in these latter days.

So they do not need such "protection" from medical practitioners or non-practitioners as the esteemed profession of doctoring sometimes seeks to have us believe. Ordinarily, the citizen who can earn his own living and be prepared to care for others, participate intelligently in election, pay taxes, be subject to military duty, and otherwise discharge the obligations of modern life, is capable of deciding what sort of treatment he desires for the conserving of his health. He is not, moreover, incapable as a rule of likewise choosing how his children shall be healed of their real or fancied ills. So care should be exercised to the end that friendly and self-sacrificing medical practitioners shall not take upon themselves the burden of deciding these matters for all the people.

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