Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/382

376 movement inaugurated, it is this one. It is a movement by physicians for the reduction of disease, which ipso facto means a movement against their financial interests.

The writer is a member of the regular profession; he nevertheless would not wish for a moment to limit the freedom of any citizen to choose his physician from some other school or cult, providing the individual assuming the function and responsibilities of a physician had the training necessary to prevent him from endangering the life of his patient by lack of medical knowledge or skill.

The official mouthpiece of this "National League for Medical Freedom" is Mr. B. O. Flower, who has had heretofore the reputation of a fighter for everything involving the spiritual, social and physical progress of humanity, and it is inexplicable to many of his admirers how he can lead a movement opposed to the improvement of the health of the nation. The vast majority in the ranks of this so-called "league," though they may be well-meaning, noble, and earnest, are not men and women who have toiled patiently for years in order to acquire the thorough scientific medical training which enables one to assume that great responsibility of the care and treatment of the sick. They are unable to appreciate the inestimable value of federal help in preventing disease. These people are blindly following certain individuals who designate the regular profession as a medical trust, and accuse the thousands of noble men and women who are devoting their lives to the alleviation of human ills of a desire to monopolize medical practise. The establishment of a federal department of health would mean pure food, pure medicine, control of plagues and epidemics, the advancement of medical science and through it the improvement of the health and increase of material wealth of the nation. It is said that many of the individuals opposing the Owen bill are commercially interested in the manufacture of drugs or patent medicines, of which latter the American people swallow about $200,000,000 worth annually. Whether it is true or not that the National League for Medical Freedom is backed financially by drug manufacturers and patent medicine concerns, I am not prepared to say; yet even these men have nothing to fear from a federal department of health if the drugs they put on the market are pure and the claims made for patent medicines do not delude the public or endanger its health. The element which clamors most loudly for medical freedom is composed in many instances of men and women who have attended one or two courses of lectures or got their "degrees" without any training at all, and have developed into "doctors" and "healers" in a most remarkably short space of time.

Because the American Medical Association has always advocated a thorough medical education, is pleading constantly for pure drugs, is opposed to quackery, patent medicines and nostrums, its 40,000