Here are four statements. One is by Mr. Wood, the Society's lecturer; one by Lord Llangattock, its President; one is published in its official journal; and one is by Mr. Coleridge, its honorary secretary and treasurer. That is the sort of thing which seems good enough to the National Society to say to its friends in Parliament; this childish nonsense about the true sportsman and his quarry.
III
The attitude of these Societies toward the medical profession, and toward the Hospitals, must be studied. Let us look through some numbers of the official journal of the National Society, and see the attitude that it sometimes takes toward the medical profession:—
June 1899.—"The charm of this sort of thing is that you are always sure of the post-mortem if of nothing else."
July 1899.—"There is a disease, well known to the vestrymen of London, called 'the half-crown diphtheria.' This is common sore throat, notified as diphtheria because the vestry pays a fee of half-a-crown to the medical notifier."
December 1899.—"The patient died, made miserable by the effect of inoculations which even on bacteriological grounds gave no promise of success, but the scientific physician, nowadays, must inject something in the way of a serum."
March 1901.—"There will always be those who, unable to think for themselves or exercise their independence on therapeutic methods, are prone to bow down before authority which is self-assertive enough to compel the obedience of weak minds. Such men would inject antitoxin though every case died. They administer it not knowing why."
April 1901.—(From "Our Cause in the Press"): "What effort does the medical profession make to make clear to its clients what is well known to itself, that disease is the result of wrong living? Practically none at all. The medical profession as a whole have winked at sin, and have merely sought to antidote its results."
September 1901.—"Some day we shall have our surgeons disembowelling us just to see what daylight and fresh air will do for the stomach-ache."
December 1901.—"The new medicine demands a mere laboratory habit; the patient is nothing, the disease everything. He is a test-tube; such and such reagents are needed to produce a certain result, and there you are. The patient's malady, be it what it may, is due to a microbe, a toxin, or a ptomaine; he must be inoculated with the serum or antitoxin which counteracts his disease, and this must be done not secundum artem but secundum scientiam, and the science means the inoculating syringe and so many cubic centimetres of filth wherewith to poison the man's blood and so cure his disease, though the victims die."