Anonymous

“ After practicing two or three years, abusing medicine and medical men all the time, and proclaiming to the people continually that they had in Osteopathy all that a sick world could ever need, it is suddenly learned that the “Osteopath is gone.” He has “silently folded his tent and stolen away,” and where has he gone? He has gone to a medical college to study that same medicine he has so industriously abused while he was gathering in the shekels as an Osteopath. Going to learn and practice the science he has so persistently denounced as a fraud and a curse to humanity. ”

“ 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. It may be known that your business is poor, and that you go to your office and sit in solitude day in and day out, and that you starve and skimp at home, but so long as you keep up the show, you are a “professional man!” What mighty courage it takes to acknowledge what everybody else knows, and quit! A writer in a medical journal told of a young physician in Boston who put an ad. ”

“ When it comes to grafting in connection with therapeutics, the layman’s educational armor, which affords him protection against most forms of graft in business, seems utterly useless. True, it affords protection against the more vulgar nostrum grafting that claims its millions of victims among the masses; but when the educated man meets the “new discovery,” “new method” grafter he bares his bosom and welcomes him as a friend and fellow-scientist. It is the educated man’s creed to-day to accept everything that comes to him in the name of science. ”

“ That graft in surgery and shystering in internal medicine exists no one in the medical profession denies. It has come so insidiously that the profession itself was taken unawares. However, that sweeping denunciation of the entire profession should follow is unwarranted. Every other profession and calling has its black sheep, and it is the duty of the leaders in each to eliminate them. Elimination, however, cannot come entirely from within. The public has its share of responsibility and duty to perform, and the sooner this is realized, the better for all concerned. ”

“ In spite of the apparent prevalence of graft and the seemingly unprecedented dishonesty of those who serve the public, there are not wanting signs of the coming of better things. The eminent physician who spoke of the turbidity of therapeutics thought it was only that agitation that precedes crystallization and clarification that brings purity, and not greater pollution. May the seeming bad condition not be due in part also to the fact that a larger number of our American people are becoming intelligent enough to know the sham from the genuine, and to know when they are being imposed upon? ”

“ In sorrow and disgust sometimes the conscientious physician realizes that he is handicapped in his work to either prevent or cure disease, because he has to work with people who have wrong notions of his power and of the potency of agencies he employs. With shame he must acknowledge that the people hold such erroneous ideas of medicine, not because of general ignorance, but because they have been intentionally taught them by the army of quacks outside and the host of grafters and incompetents inside the regular medical profession. ”

“ Failurephobia! Among professional men what a terrible disease it is! I have known it to drive a young man, who might have been happy and useful as a farmer or mechanic, into a suicide’s grave. Such cases are not uncommon. Who are the M.D.s whose pictures and glaring ads. appear in those 15-cent papers published in Augusta, Me., and in many daily and even religious papers? Are they men who took to graft and disgraced their profession because they loved that kind of life, and the stigma it brings? ”

“ When a physician, however, meets a fellow who claims to have in his Osteopathy a wonderful system, complete and all-sufficient to cope with any and all diseases, and that his system is founded on a knowledge of the relation and function of the various parts and organs of the body such as no other school of therapeutics has ever been able to discover, then he knows that he has met a man of the same mental and moral calibre as the shyster in his own school. He knows he has met a fellow who is exploiting a thing, that may be good in its way and place, as a graft. ”

“ The people have strongly suspected graft in surgery, many of them know it, and nearly all have been taught by journals of the new schools that such grafting is a characteristic of medical schools, and is asserted to be condoned and encouraged by the profession as a whole. How refreshing, then, to hear a representative surgeon of the American Medical Association say:
“The moral standards set for professional men are going to be higher in the future, and with the limelight of public opinion turned on the medical and surgical grafter, the evil will cease to exist.” ”

“ When you consider that thousands of Osteopaths (yes, there are several thousand of them in the field treating the people) are buying some one of the various Osteopathic journals by the hundreds every month and distributing them gratis to the people until the whole country is literally saturated, and that other cults are almost as busy disseminating their literature, do you wonder that the people are getting biased notions of the medical profession in general and the American Medical Association in particular? ”

“ To make an application of all this, let us not be too hard on the quack and the shyster. He is largely a product of our social system. Society has placed temptations before him to get money, and he must keep up the appearances of success at any cost of honesty and independent manhood. The poor professional man who is a victim of that fearful disease, failurephobia, in his weakness has become a slave to public opinion. ”

“ I have seen some of the best Osteopaths treat wry-neck, and the work they did was to knead and stretch and pull, which by starting circulation and working out soreness, gradually relieved the patient. A hot application, by expanding tissues and stimulating circulation, would have had the same effect, perhaps more slowly manifested.
To call any Osteopathic treatment massage is always resented as an insult by the guardians of the science. What is the Osteopath doing, who rolls and twists and pulls and kneads for a full hour, if he isn’t giving a massage treatment? ”

“ There has been many a tragic scene enacted upon the Osteopathic stage, but the curtain has not been raised for the public to behold them. How many timid old maids, after saving a few hundred dollars from wages received for teaching school, have been persuaded that they could learn Osteopathy while their shattered nerves were repaired and they were made young and beautiful once more by a course of treatment in the clinics of the school. Then they would be ready to go out to occupy a place of dignity and honor, and treat ten to thirty patients per month at twenty-five dollars per patient. ”

“ 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 mad rush for wealth which has characterized the business world, has in a way induced some medical men, whether rightfully or wrongfully, to adopt the same measures in self-protection. The patient or his friends too often insist on measuring the value of our services with a commercial yard-stick, the fee to be paid being the chief consideration. In this way the public must come in for its share of responsibility for existing conditions. ”

“ Of all the fraud, bare-faced shystering, and flagrant rascality ever exposed in any profession, the circumstances of the founding of this school, as depicted by the editor of the Osteopathic Physician, furnishes the most disgusting instance. Men to whom we had clung when the anchor of our faith in Osteopathy seemed about to drag were held up before us as sneaking, cringing, incompetent rascals, whose motives in founding the school were commercial in the worst sense. ”

“ In the hands of a fellow with lots of nerve and little conscience it is the greatest of them all. This is the graft of the smart young fellow direct from a post-graduate course in the clinics of some great surgeon.
He comes to town with a great flourish of trumpets. Of course, he observes the ethics of the profession! The long accounts of his superior education and unusual experience with operative surgery are only legitimate items of news for the local papers. Certainly! It is only right that such an unusual doctor should have so much attention. ”

“ The journal printing this article comments on it in another number; tells what a great man the specialist is, and incidentally lets Osteopaths know that if any of them want to add a knowledge of “orificial surgery” to their “complete science,” this doctor is the man from whom to get it, as he is the “great and only” in his specialty, and is big and broad enough to appreciate Osteopathy.
The most despicable booster of any new system of therapeutics is the physician who becomes its champion to get a job as “professor” in one of its colleges. ”

“ I have in mind a student, one of the brightest I ever met, who read a cheap book on Osteopathic practice, went into a community where he was unknown, and practiced as an Osteopathic physician. In a few months he had made enough money to pay his way through an Osteopathic college, which he entered professing to believe that Osteopathy would cure all the ills flesh is heir to, but which he left two years later to take a medical course. He secured his D.O. degree, but I notice that it is his M.D. degree he flourishes with pride. ”

“ Last summer I heard a plug-hatted faker delivering a lecture to a street crowd, in which he said that every mother’s son or daughter of them who didn’t have the rosy cheek, the sparkling eye and buoyancy of youth might be sure that a tapeworm of monstrous size was, “like a worm in the bud,” feeding on their “damask cheeks.” To prove his assertion and lend terror to his tale, he held aloft a glass jar containing one of the monsters that had been driven from its feast on the vitals of its victim by his never-failing remedy. ”

“ Doctor, with your medical education a course in Osteopathy would teach you that it is not necessary to subject your patients to myxedema by removing the thyroid gland to cure goitre. You would not have to lie awake nights studying means to stop one of those troublesome bowel complaints in children, nor to insist upon the enforced diet in chronic diarrhea, and a thousand other things which are purely physiological and are not done by any magical presto change, but by methods which are perfectly rational if you will only listen long enough to have them explained to you. ”

“ One doctor in a town tells the people that he “breaks up” typhoid fever. His rival, perhaps from the same college, tells the people that typhoid must “run its course” and cannot be broken up, and that any man who claims the contrary is a liar and a shyster. One surgeon makes a portion of the people believe he has saved dozens of lives in that community by surgical operations; the other physicians of the town tell the people openly, or at least hint, that there has been a great deal of needless butchery performed in that community in the name of surgery. ”

“ That is, that the hope of the profession of “doctoring” being placed on an honest rational basis lies in a broader and more thorough education of the physician. A broad, liberal general education to begin with, then all that can be known about medicine and surgery. Is that enough? No. Then all that there is in physio-therapy, under whatsoever name, that promises to aid in curing or preventing disease. ”

“ Medical men need not think, either, that the people who happened to read the editorial pages referred to are the only ones who know of that declaration from Osier. Osteopathic journals, Christian Science journals, health culture journals, and all the riff-raff of journals published as individual boosters, are ever on the watch for just such things, and when they find them they “roll them under their tongue as sweet morsels.” ”

“ Because I practiced as a specialist and would not claim that Osteopathy would cure everything that any other means might cure, I have never been called a good disciple of the new science by my brethren. ”

“ Again I say there are many noble and brainy physicians, and these have made practically all the great discoveries, invented all the useful appliances, written all the great books for other schools to study, and they should have credit from the people for all this, and not be misrepresented by little pretenders. Their teachings should be applied as they gave them. The best of them to-day would have the people taught that a physician’s greatest work may be done in preventing rather than in curing disease. ”

“ The Osteopath may be a good anatomist. He has about the same opportunities to learn anatomy the medical student has. If he is a good and conscientious student he may consider his anatomy of more importance than does the medical student who is not expecting to do much surgery. If he is a natural shyster and shirk he can get through a course in Osteopathy and get his diploma, and this diploma may be about the only proof he could ever give that he is a “superior anatomist.”
Great stress has always been laid by Osteopaths upon the amount of study and research done by their students on the cadaver. ”