Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/555

Rh honored and honorable title of Doctors in Medicine? Let this once be un fait accompli, and we may rest assured that the good sense and mutual interests of the two great schools will speedily draw them together, in a process of mutual absorption, which will give a new impetus to the growth of medical science, and contribute immeasurably to a more successful, because more rational, treatment of disease.

The New York State Medical Society, representing the head and front of the profession in this country, has recently taken an initiatory step in this direction, by striking out and changing certain clauses of its ethical code which prohibited consultation with duly qualified homœopathic practitioners. Despite the unfortunate action of the American Association, in setting the stamp of their useless disapprobation upon this timely step, a thinking public must needs declare itself in approval of the New York Society. It has but constituted itself the vanguard of a movement which will soon be followed by all liberal men in the profession, and must ere long sweep away those petty obstacles to the progress of medicine, which, causing the disunion of its disciples, have limited its usefulness, weakened its experimental conclusions, and brought upon it the popular reproach of disagreement.

Many, it may be, of the older generation of physicians—minds which have crystallized unchangeably to the form of early ideas—must "pass away before these things are fulfilled," but they who are stepping forward to take their places in the great struggle with disease and death, will have their hands strengthened by a more conscious unity of work and purpose with their fellows, to which the profession of medicine has long been a stranger.

The principal barrier, let me repeat, to the attainment of this desired end lies, not within professional lines, but in the existence of this unfortunate prejudice among the people. When patients demand to be assured that a medical practitioner is not an "allopath" or a "homœopath," but—a reputable and well-educated physician, then will the folly of "exclusivism" be made manifest, not alone to the mind, but to the pocket of the profession; and then will Medicine, unembarrassed by the strife of schools, rise to her possible place as a successful and a more exact science.



E are supposed to live in an age when brute-force has ceased to rule, and when brain-power alone is the governing agent. In the good old days, the heavy, strong-armed knight, protected by his impenetrable armor, and skilled in the use of his sword, was almost invincible. A little nearer our own day, the skilled swordsman or 