Article October 21, 1922 Issue

Kindly grant me space for a few brief comments upon...

Samuel J. Macdonald, Committee on Publication for the State of New Jersey,

Camden Daily Courier

Kindly grant me space for a few brief comments upon your editorial which appeared in a recent issue of your paper. In the Journal of the American Medical Association of April 18, 1914, will be found a summary of an official inquiry into Bellevue and Allied Hospitals. From this it appears that clinical diagnoses in Bellevue Hospital were "not confirmed in 47.7 per cent;" that is, almost one half were wrong. The cause for this is stated frankly in the report: "Medical knowledge is not sufficiently advanced to enable physicians to diagnose with great degree of accuracy."

In the Medical Record of New York of March 22, 1919, Fenton B. Turck, M. D., eminent in his profession many years and author of many medical works, writes: "According to recent reports of the Allied Medical and Surgical Congress, the failure to cure shock, wound diseases, and pneumonia is an admitted fact. The ancient belief that the sick man was possessed with a demon which must be driven out has its modern parallel in the belief that the starting point of disease is in the introduction of a foreign agent into the body. The germ is the modern demon. You have but to substitute the idea of the germ for the idea of the demon, and the medical practice of to-day is but a kind of exorcism. Time-honored traditions have a tenacious life, and in this case we have a superstition surviving long after the attempt has been made to make medical treatment a science."

On June 15, 1921, at Atlantic City, at the annual meeting of the Medical Society of New Jersey, Martin J. Synnott, A. M., M. D., Lieut.-Col. M. R. C., U. S. A., formerly chief of Medical Service, Camp Dix, delivered an oration entitled, "A Survey of Modern Medicine," the opening sentences of which were as follows:—

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