death or impaired health. One of the gravest charges against the prescribing of medicines is that they suppress or mask the symptoms and do not remove the cause of the disease, but leave the patient to continue in the error of his ways until overtaken again by the same trouble or an equivalent that has cropped out in some other place; and by that time the malady has perhaps reached a fatal stage.
In some respects doctors are like cats. They caterwaul, and occasionally they purr. When a woman patient calls at a doctor’s office and he does not know just what is the matter with her or what to do to cure her, if he belongs to a certain type in the profession, he holds her hand and purrs and is so sympathetic that she leaves his office in a transport, walks on air, and goes home convinced that no one understands her case as well as he does. Or else he tells her how beautiful she looked on the operating table. After such a subtle appeal to her vanity she pays without demur his bill of $300 or $400.
He takes great care not to offend his patients by telling them unpleasant truths, but instead resorts to delicate flattery. If a woman comes to his office suffering from some ailment brought on chiefly by eating devitalized foods, he purrs softly while he determines the latitude and longitude of her pain and gently inquires if she has had a shock recently. She thinks hard for a moment and recalls that she has had, that the news of the death of a child of an intimate friend was broken to her abruptly. Yes, that must have been what caused her condition.
Lacking the ability to direct patients headed for perdition by reason of wrong living how to live so that they can regain their health while continuing their work where they are, he sometimes recommends a change of climate or that they take a rest. Change of scene or occupation usually affords some slight temporary alleviation that the patients regard as a cure.
When patients have a cold or the grippe, instead of making plain to them what laws of health they have violated and that their illness is a direct result, the doctor, it not infrequently happens, tells them that it is “going around.” Colds and grippe are consequently in the popular mind of mysterious origin, and
the victims complacently regard themselves as blameless but unfortunate.
It is because the medical profession teaches people to look outside of themselves for the causes of their maladies that we see such spectacles as Caruso, obliged to break professional engagements that would have yielded him $100,000, ascribing his case of grippe to external influences. “I like everything in New York except its colds and grippe,” he is quoted as saying in an interview. “I think I can boast that I have had the most expensive case of grippe on record. It has cost me $100,000. The public says I am a great singer. I should be a greater man if I were a scientist who could drive grippe out of the country. See if you can’t drive it out of New York before I come back.”
Note the boast. As if ill-health and operations were something to be proud of! Instead of telling our acquaintances of our ailments in the expectation of getting their sympathy, we ought to be ashamed to be sick. They may understand what internal conditions colds, grippe, and other ailments presuppose, and have a feeling of repulsion toward us, not of sympathy.
The germ theory of disease is in great vogue at present with the regular—or allopathic, as it is sometimes called—school of medicine. Some of the leading physicians of other schools, however, predict that the day is not far distant when the contagiousness and infectiousness of disease through germs, vaccination, the injection of serums as preventives or cures, and the resorting to the use of medicines by deluded people as a substitute for correcting their habits of living, will be generally regarded as superstitions. When that day comes, we shall cease this Pharisaical self-righteous attitude, this dread and suspicion of others as germ-laden, and face the truth that we build our own diseases.
Even some of the regulars do not hold orthodox views; for instance, Dr. Charles Creighton, an eminent English physician. He has made a special study of epidemics and was engaged to write an article for the Encyclopædia Britannica on vaccination. At that time he was a believer in it, but changed his views when he investigated the subject. What he wrote was omitted from the American editions. “As a medical man,” he once declared, “I assert that vaccination is an insult to common sense; that