p. 8 | CRAZE FOR DOCTORING by T.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 12, 1900

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 26, No. 37.

"CRAZE FOR DOCTORING."

By T.

AN editorial in a recent issue of a New York paper said: "Dr. Jacobi, writing in the Medical Record, says that in the United States there is one physician to every 600 people—proportionately twice as many as in Great Britain, four times as many as in France, five times as many as in Germany, and six times as many as in Italy. And Dr. Jacobi might have gone on to show that we take an interest in patent or proprietary medicines, and in various other forms of extra-professional treatment which is almost non-existent in Europe."

"There must be some explanation of this American craze for doctoring. Certainly it is not that we are a sickly and an ailing race. On the contrary, we are exceptionally hardy and enduring. It may be that our backwardness in the art of cooking has a great deal to do with it. Outside of a few highly-favored centers the efforts of cooks are directed chiefly to the concocting of sundry fried messes that are pleasing to the palate, but productive of that lumpy feeling in the pit of the stomach, and afterward of all manner of disorders, from a general sense of gloom and dissatisfaction and need of some sort of medicine, to complete collapse and a fierce struggle with death. A good cook can come pretty near to keeping the doctor out of the house."

The foregoing is among the many strong evidences that we are rapidly drifting away from good sense methods of living. We are in too big a hurry to take the time to either properly prepare or eat our food, or to take care of ourselves when feeling ill, and under this strain men are constantly grasping for some kind of nostrum that will quickly make them feel exhilarated, so that they can drive on in their pursuit for money or pleasure. In the very nature of things this condition, even if there were no other deteriorating elements entering into the problem, would soon transform society into a state that would prefigure anything else rather than the millennium. At the pace the world is going to-day it would soon destroy itself if the Lord did not come, to put an end to the degradations and degenerating influences that are working so intensely at the present time. T.