“Oh, no, you don’t!” laughed the girl. “You handle conditions as the human, mortal mind believes them to be, that’s all. You accept its ugly pictures as real, and then you try desperately through legislation to make us all accept them. Yet you would bitterly resent it if some religious body should try to legislate its beliefs upon you.
“Now listen, you doctors are rank materialists. Perhaps it is because, as Hawthorne puts it, in your researches into the human frame your higher and more subtle faculties are materialized, and you lose the spiritual view of existence. Your only remedy for diseased matter is more matter. And these material remedies? Why, ignorance and superstition have given rise to by far the larger number of remedies in use by you to-day! And all of your attempts to rationalize medicine and place it upon a systematic basis have signally failed, because the only curative property a drug has is the credulity of the person who swallows it. And that is a factor which varies with the individual.”
“The most advanced physicians give little medicine nowadays, Miss Carmen.”
“They are beginning to get away from it, little by little,” she replied. “In recent years it has begun to dawn upon doctors and patients alike that the sick who recover do so, not because of the drugs which they have taken, but in spite of them! One of the most prominent of our contemporary physicians who are getting away from the use of drugs has said that eighty-five per cent of all illnesses get well of their own accord, no matter what may or may not be done for them. In a very remarkable article from this same doctor’s pen, in which he speaks of the huge undertaking which physicians must assume in order to clear away the materia medica rubbish of the ages, he states that the greatest struggle which the coming doctor has on his hands is with drugs, and the deadly grip which they have on the confidence and affections both of the profession and of the public. Among his illuminating remarks about the drug system, I found two drastic statements, which should serve to lift the veil from the eyes of the chronic drug taker. These are, first, ‘Take away opium and alcohol, and the backbone of the patent medicine business would be broken inside of forty-eight hours,’ and, second, ‘No drug, save quinine and mercury in special cases, will cure a disease.’ In words which he quotes from another prominent physician, ‘He is the best doctor who knows the worthlessness of most drugs.’
“The hundreds of drugs listed in books on materia medica I find are gradually being reduced in number to a possible forty or fifty, and one doctor makes the radical statement that they can be cut down to the ‘six or seven real drugs.’ Still further light has been thrown upon the debasing nature of the drugging system by a member of the Philadelphia Drug Exchange, in a recent hearing before the House Committee on municipal affairs right here. He is reported as saying that it makes little difference what a manufacturer puts into a patent medicine, for, after all, the effect of the medicine depends upon the faith of the user. The sick man who turns to patent medicines for relief becomes the victim of ‘bottled faith.’ If his faith is sufficiently great, a cure may be effected––and the treatment has been wholly mental! The question of ethics does not concern either the patent medicine manufacturer or the druggist, for they argue that if the sick man’s faith has been aroused to the point of producing a cure, the formula of the medicine itself is of no consequence, and, therefore, if a solution of sugar and water sold as a cure for colds can stimulate the sufferer’s faith to the point of meeting his need, the business is quite legitimate. ‘A bunch of bottles and sentiment,’ adds this member of the Drug Exchange, ‘are the real essentials for working healing miracles.’”
“Say!” exclaimed the doctor, again sitting back and regarding her with amazement. “You have a marvelous memory for data!”
“But, Doctor, I am intensely interested in my fellow-men. I want to help them, and show them how to learn to live.”
“So am I,” he returned. “And I am doing all I can, the very best I know how to do.”