p. 19 | A HAPPY COUNTRY

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 15, 1875

A HAPPY COUNTRY.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a distinguished professor in the medical department of Harvard University, has expressed the serious conviction that the world would be infinitely better off if all the drugs in it were cast into the sea. If this celebrated poet and physician is correct in his conclusion, and we cannot doubt that he is, France must be a happy country; for an exchange informs us that in that favored country there are cities of 15,000 inhabitants which have not a single physician, while others of a population of 20,000 have but one. The city of Roubaix contains 76,000 persons, who are drugged by only eight doctors. Fortunate indeed must such a people be, unless the place of physicians is supplied by ignorant quacks and charlatans. We have no enmity against the physician, per se, nor even against his drugs, provided that they are wisely employed; but we most heartily deplore the terrible waste of life which we yearly witness as the result of employing in the treatment of disease articles which could be only appropriately used in destroying vermin and superannuated dogs.

We are almost persuaded to believe that if the hypothesis of Dr. Holmes could be realized, the fact that the great majority of chronic diseases would cease to exist except in the pages of medical history.