Page:History of Goodhue County, Minnesota.djvu/395

 HISTORY OF GOODHUE COUNT! 7 329 before the disease das progressed t<><> far. The question of the necessity for treatmenl is not decided by the family physician, hut by those not qualified to determine the meaning or gravity of the symptoms. To recognize disease and apply the remedies for it. is to the lay mind, the extent of the physician's office, and is all that custom demands. A Large proportion of serious cases which come before physicians arc made serious by neglect, and the neglect arises from the disease not being recognized in its early curable stages. This fact accounts for a large proportion of operations that are performed nowadays. The frequency of sudden death from unsuspected heart and kidney disease further illustrates how seldom the physical condition of a person not consciously ill is made the subject of investigation. There are few children of school age free from one or more physical ail- ments, few adults not afflicted with some chronic disability. All this would be guarded against if the family physician were the sanitary adviser, having constant supervision of the family, instead of being called only when someone has broken a leg or one of the children has the croup. So long as a man sees in his physician only a feeler of pulses and a writer of prescriptions, the relation of medicine to him cannot be expected to improve. Today physicians are no longer a group of men and women to whom one only looks for a diagnosis and a prescription. They have come to recognize the fact that their usefulness as physi- cians in dealing with disease problems depends in a great meas- ure on the cooperation of the public. They must have intelligent cooperation to make their work as effective as it is possible for it to be. Prevention of disease is typical of the line in which medi- cine as a whole is to have its principal development in the near future. Let once the idea be grasped that the physician is engaged in preventing disease, instead of waiting for an opportunity to cure it — that his mission is a wider one than merely to deal out pills or open abscesses, or attend confinements — and men will prefer to put themselves under such directions as will tend to avert illness, instead of relying upon this or that method of cure in case they should become ill. A large part of society has ever been against legitimate medi- cine, depending upon the scientific physician in time of trouble, yet in the interim openly supporting all sorts of shams, frauds and impostors. "The horizon of the average man's interest in medicine," says Dr. Welch, "scarcely extends beyond the cir- cumference of his own body or that of his family, and he meas- ures the value of the medical art by its capacity to cure his cold, his rheumatism and his dyspepsia, all unconscious, because he does not encounter them, of the many perils which medicine has removed from his path through life. What does he know of the