Quacks and Grafters. Anonymous

people are getting biased notions of the medical profession in general and the American Medical Association in particular? While my faith in the integrity and efficacy of the “new school” remained intact and at a fanatical pitch, my sympathy was with the “independent” journals. The doctrine of “therapeutic liberty” seemed a fair one, and one that was only American. After studying both sides, and comparing the journals, I have commenced to wonder if the man who preaches universal liberty so strenuously is not, in most cases, only working for individual license.

      I wrote a paper some time ago, out of which this booklet has grown, and sent it to the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. He was kind enough to say it was full of “severe truth” that should be published to the laity. In that paper I diagnosed the therapeutic situation of to-day as a “deplorable muddle,” and I am glad to have my diagnosis confirmed by a prominent writer in the Journal of the Association. He says:

      “Therapeutics to-day cannot be called a science, it can only be called a confusion. With a dozen dissenting opinions as to the most essential and efficacious therapeutic agents inside the school, and a horde of new school pretenders outside, each with his own little system that he heralds as the best and only right way, and all these separated in everything but their attack on the regulars, there certainly is a ‘turbidity of therapeutics!’”

      And this therapeutic stream is the one that flows for the “healing of nations!” Should not its waters be pure and uncontaminated, so that the invalid who thirsts for health may drink with confidence in their healing virtues?

      If the stream shows turbid to the physician, how must it appear to his patient as he stands upon the shore and sees conflicting currents boil and swirl in fierce contention, forming eddies that are continually stranding poor devils on the drifts of discarded remedies, while streams of murky waters (new schools) pour in from every side and add their filth. To the patient it becomes “confusion, worse confounded.”

CHAPTER II.

       Table of Contents

      GRAFT AND FAILUREPHOBIA.

      The Commercial Spirit—Commercialism in Medicine—Stock Company Medical Colleges—Graft in Medicines, Drugs and Nostrums—Encyclopedia Graft—“Get-Rich-Quick” Propositions—Paradoxes in Character of Shysters—Money Madness—Professional Failurephobia—The Fortunate Few and the Unfortunate Many—A Cause of Quackery—The Grafter’s Herald—The World’s Standard—Solitary Confinement—The Prisoner’s Dream—Working up a Cough—Situation Appalling Among St. Louis Physicians—A Moral Pointed.

      This chapter is not written because I possess a hammer that must be used. My liver is sound, and I have a pretty good job. Neither palpation nor “osculation” (as one of our bright Osteopathic students once said in giving means used in physical diagnosis) reveals any “lesion” in my domestic affairs.

      However, it doesn’t take the jaundiced eye of a pessimist to see the graft that abounds to-day. The grafter is abroad in the land like a wolf seeking whom he may devour, and the sheep-skin (sometimes a diploma) that once disguised his wolfish character has become so tattered by much use that it now deceives only the most foolish sheep. Once a sheep-skin of patriotism disguised the politician, and people fancied that a public office was a public trust. The revelations of the last few years have taught us that too often a public office is but a public steal.

      The commercial spirit dominates the age. Nothing is too sacred for its defiling hands to touch. The church does not escape. Preachers accuse each other of following their Lord for the loaves and fishes. Lawyers accuse each other of taking fees from both sides. Leading physicians unhesitatingly say that commercialism is the bane of the medical profession. They say hundreds are rushing into medicine because they have heard of the large earnings of a few fortunate city physicians, and think they are going into something that will bring them plenty of “easy money.” Stock company medical colleges have been organized by men whose main object was to get a share of the money these hosts of would-be doctors had to spend. Even the new systems of therapeutics such as Osteopathy, that have boomed themselves into a kind of popularity, have their schools that, to believe what some of them say of each other, are dominated by the rankest commercialism, being, in fact, nothing but Osteopathic diploma mills.

      Not alone has graft pervaded the schools whose business it is supposed to be to make capable physicians. The graft that has been uncovered lately in connection with the preparation and sale of medicines, drugs and nostrums is almost incredible when we think of the danger to health and human life involved. The same brand of ghouls who tamper with and juggle medicines for gain, do not hesitate to adulterate and poison food. With their inferior, filthy and “preserved” milk they slaughter the innocents to make a paltry profit. The story Sinclair wrote of the nauseating horrors of slaughter-houses was enough to drive us all to the ranks of vegetarians forever.

      Only recently I chanced to learn that even in the business of publishing there is a little world of graft peculiar to itself. I was told by a responsible book man that the encyclopedia containing a learned (?) exposition of the science of Osteopathy is the product of grafters, who took old material and worked in a little new matter, such as the exposition of Osteopathy, to make their work appear up to date to the casual observer. Then, to make the graft worse, for a consideration, it was alleged, a popular publisher let his name be used, and thus thousands were caught who bought the work relying on the reputation of the publisher, who, it appears, had nothing whatever to do with the encyclopedia.

      Physicians, school teachers and preachers, all supposedly poor financiers, know about the swarms of grafters who hound them with “get-rich-quick” propositions into which they want them to put their scant surplus of salary or income as they get it. A physician told me he would have been $2,000 better off if a year or two before he had been a subscriber to a certain medical journal that poses as a sort of “watch dog” of the physician’s treasury.

      Pessimistic as this review may seem, there is yet room for optimism, and, paradoxical as it may sound, men are not always as bad as their business. I know of a lawyer who in his profession has the reputation of being the worst shyster that ever argued a case. No scheme is too dishonest for his use if it will win his case. Yet this man outside of his profession, in his home, and in his society, is as fine a gentleman as you would wish to meet—a model husband and father, a kind and obliging neighbor, a generous supporter of all that is for the upbuilding and bettering of society. Strong case, do you say? I believe our country is full of such cases. And I believe the medical profession has thousands of just such men, men whose instincts are for nobility of character and whose moral ideals are high, but whose business standards are groveling.

      They live a sort of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” life, and why? Are they not to blame? And are they not to be classed as scoundrels? Yes—and no. These men are diseased. Their contact with the world has inoculated them with the world’s contagion. What is this disease? The diagnosis has been considered simple. So simple that the world has called it commercialism, or money madness, and treated the disease according to this diagnosis without studying it further. May it not be true that, for many cases at least, the diagnosis is wrong? Do men choose the strenuous, money-grabbing life because they really love it, or love the money? I believe thousands of men in professional life to-day, who are known as dollar-chasers, really long for a more simple life, but the disease they have has robbed them of the power to choose “that better part.” And that disease is not money madness, but failurephobia.

      The fear of failing, or of being called a failure, dominates the professional world as no other power could. It claims thousands of poor fellows who were brought up to the active, worth-while life of the farm or of a trade, and chains them to a miserable, sham, death-in-life sort of existence, that they come to loathe, but dare not leave because of their disease, failurephobia.

      Success is the world’s standard. Succeed in your business or profession, by honest means if you can, but succeed! At least, keep up the appearance of succeeding, and you may keep your place in society.