Medicine and the Healing Art
In a recent number of The Literary Digest we find the following quotations from The Hospital, taken from “an editorial in which it uses words about the medical profession that read strangely in the pages of a medical magazine:” — “A science, if it be a science, springing in the far past from mystery and witchcraft, tainted with the methods of the sorcerer, and even now dominated by that overmastering faith in drugs and nostrums which is the direct and disastrous heritage handed down to us by our immediate ancestors, the apothecaries. It has been an ignoble spectacle. No one taking a broad view. Each man limited by his education, and trudging along in the rut of his old habits—physicians pouring in drugs, surgeons scraping out bits of diseased tissue, while even now, in the full light of bacteriological science, we find men attempting to cure consumption by soaking the patient’s tissues with antiseptics; and all this in defiance of the teachings of pathology, which go to show how frequently the disease gets well if the patient’s vitality, the vis medicatrix naturae, is but given a fair chance. Yet, how near we were to the truth if we would but have listened, if we would but have cut ourselves adrift from the prejudices ingrained in us by our education, and, in the words of one great man, have thrown ‘physic to the dogs,’ and, in those of another, have investigated all things by ‘observation and experiment.’ Once a year we have met together to do honor to the immortal Harvey, and then we have returned to this miserable drug giving as if Harvey had never existed.” The occasion for all this is the award of the first prize of twenty-five hundred dollars for the best essay on the proposed King’s Sanatorium for tuberculosis. The successful competitor, Dr. Arthur Latham, does not believe in treating consumption with drugs, and advocates the fresh-air method, whose introducers, half a century ago, were tabooed by their medical brethren. Says the writer in The Hospital again:— “It is one of our amiable weaknesses to hold patent medicines in ridicule and contempt, but what could be more ridiculous, considering the teachings of the dead-house, than the current treatment of consumption so aptly described by Dr. Latham—a mere pouring in of drugs without any attempt to touch the root of the disease. Yet in the midst of all this drugging, which has been going on for longer than we can remember, there have been men who saw the truth. So far back as 1840, George Bodington insisted on the importance of a generous diet and a constant supply of pure air, and propounded the terrible heresy that ‘cold is never too intense for a consumptive patient.’ In 1855 Dr. Henry MacCormac, the father of the late Sir William MacCormac, published a book on somewhat similar lines, and in 1861 read a paper before the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in which he advocated what are now established principles. Yet what was the treatment which these pioneers received at the hands of their professional colleagues? Bodington’s book, says Latham, ‘met with much bitter and fierce opposition, and eventually the disapproval of his methods became so universal that patients were driven from his sanatorium,’ while ‘the members of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society refused to pass the usual vote of thanks to Dr. MacCormac, because they thought that the paper was written by a monomaniac.’ . . . Meanwhile, notwithstanding our ostracism of new ideas, the teaching of Bodington, of MacCormac, and of the modern host of sanatorium owners has prevailed; and now, at last, in the full sunshine of royal patronage, we admit how simple is the truth, expressed as it is by the motto of Dr. Latham’s essay: ‘Give him air; he’ll straight be well.’ What sycophants we all are!”