Quacks and Grafters

by Anonymous

There are many able men among physicians who feel keenly their limitations, when they have done their best, and this class would gladly have their patients understand the limitations as well as the powers of the physician. 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.

Incompetent physicians, to succeed financially (and that is the only idea of success incompetents are capable of appreciating), must practice as shysters. They fully understand how necessary it is to the successful working of their grafts to keep the people in ignorance of what a physician may legitimately and conscientiously do.

Our medical brethren who preach the “all but holy” doctrine, and want to maintain the “attitude of infallibility toward the public,” will disagree with me about there being “a host” of incompetents in the regular school of medical practice. I shall not ask that they take the possibly biased opinion of an ex-Osteopath, but refer them to the report of the committee appointed by the American Medical Association to examine the medical colleges of the United States as to their ability to make competent physicians. “One-half of all the medical schools of our country are utterly unfit to turn out properly qualified physicians, and many of them are so dominated by commercialism that they are but little better than diploma mills”! That’s what the committee said.

It has been argued that the capable physician need not fear the incompetent pretender, for, like dregs, he must “settle to the bottom” and find his place. This might be true if the people had correct notions of the true theory of therapeutics. As it is, the scholarly, competent physician knows (and intelligent laymen often know) that the pretenders too often are the fellows who get the reputations of being the “big doctors.” Why? I think mainly because, being ignorant, they practice largely as quacks, and by curing (?) all kinds of dangerous (on their own diagnosis) diseases quickly, “breaking up” this and “aborting” that unbreakable and unabortable disease (by “hot air” treatment mainly), they place the whole system upon such a basis of quackery that the deluded masses often pronounce the best equipped and most conscientious physician a “poor doctor,” because he will not pretend to do all that the wind-jamming grafter claims he has done and can do.

Here is a case in point which I know to be true. The farce began some years ago in a small college in Oregon. A big, awkward, harmless-looking fellow came to the college one fall and entered the preparatory department. At the end of the year, after he had failed in every examination and shown conclusively that he had no capacity to learn anything, he was told that it was a waste of time for him to go to school, and they could not admit him for another year. Was he squelched? Not he. The fires of ambition yet burned in his breast, and the next year he turned up at a medical college. I presume it had the same high educational requirements for admission that some other medical colleges have, and enforced them in about the same way. At any rate he met the requirements ($$$), and pursued his medical researches with bright visions of being a doctor to lure him on. But his inability to learn anything manifested itself again, and, presumably, his money gave out. At any rate he was sent away without a diploma. Still the fire of ambition was not extinguished in his manly bosom. Regulations were not strict in those days, so he went to a small town, wore fine clothes, a silk hat and a pompous air, and—within a short time was being called for forty miles around to “counsel little doctors” in their desperate cases. Such cases are all too common, as honest physicians know.

How humiliating to the conscientiously equipped doctor to hear people say of a man who never had more brains than he needed, and had hopelessly muddled what he had by using his own dope and stimulants: “I tell you Doc Booze is the best doctor in town yet when he’s half sober!” Strange, isn’t it, that in many communities people have an idea that an inclination on the part of a physician toward whisky or dope indicates some peculiar mental fitness for a doctor? “Poor fellow, he formed the habit of taking stimulants to keep up when he had to go night and day during the big typhoid epidemic, you know.” For what per cent. of cases of medical dipsomaniacs this constitutes a stock excuse, only medical men know. As an Osteopathic physician I was never rushed so that I felt the necessity for “keeping up on stimulants.” If I had been, to be consistent, I should have had to stimulate (?) mechanically, of course.

Not only do shysters and pretenders abuse the confidence of the masses in matters of diagnosis and medication, but of late years they are working another species of graft that is beginning to react against the profession. This graft consists in the over-use of therapeutic appliances that are all right in their place when legitimately used.

By what standard is the physician judged by the people who enter his office? It used to be the display of medical literature. Sometimes some of it was pseudo-medical literature. Did you ever know a shyster to pad his library with Congressional reports? I have. The literature used to be conspicuously placed in the waiting-room, with a ponderous volume lying open on the desk.

Have you a “leading doctor” in your town? Often he is not only in the lead but has flagged all the others at the quarter post—put them all into the “has been” class. What an elegant office he has! Plush rugs and luxurious couches in the waiting-room. Double doors into the private and operating-rooms, left open when not in actual use to give impressive glimpses of glass cases filled with glittering instruments, any one of which would give the lie to Solomon’s declaration that “there is nothing new under the sun.” An X-ray machine fills a conspicuous corner. In the same room are tanks, tubes, inhalers, hot-air appliances, vibrators, etc. One full side of the room is filled with shelves that groan under a load of the medicines he “keeps and dispenses.” What are all of these hundreds of bottles for if it is true, as many of our greatest physicians say, that a comparatively few people are benefited by drugs? These numerous bottles may contain placebos. I do not know as to that, but I do know something of the impression such a display makes on the mind of an intelligent layman. The query in his mind is how much of that entire display is for its legitimate effect on the minds of the patients, and how much of it is to impress the people with the powers of this physician, with his “wonderful equipment” to cope with all manner of disease?

If there is any doubt in the minds of physicians that laymen do know and think well over the sayings of drug nihilists, let them talk with intelligent people and hear them quote from the editorial page of a great daily such sentiments as this (from the Chicago Record-Herald):