I have known a medical man--a young one--who was seriously of the opinion
that the country ought to be divided into medical parishes, with a
practitioner appointed to each, and a penalty for calling in any but the
incumbent curer. How should people know how to choose? The hair-dressers
once petitioned Parliament for an act to compel people to wear wigs. My own
opinion is of the opposite extreme, as in the following letter (_Examiner_,
April 5, 1856); which, to my surprise, I saw reprinted in a medical
journal, as a {267} plan not absolutely to be rejected. I am perfectly
satisfied that it would greatly promote true medical orthodoxy, the
predominance of well educated thinkers, and the development of their
desirable differences.
"SIR. The Medical Bill and the medical question generally is one on which
experience would teach, if people would be taught.
"The great soul question took three hundred years to settle: the little
body question might be settled in thirty years, if the decisions in the
former question were studied.
"Time was when the State believed, as honestly as ever it believed
anything, that it _might_, _could_, and _should_ find out the true doctrine
for the poor ignorant community; to which, like a worthy honest state, it
added _would_. Accordingly, by the assistance of the Church, which
undertook the physic, the surgery, and the pharmacy of sound doctrine all
by itself, it sent forth its legally qualified teachers into every parish,
and woe to the man who called in any other. They burnt that man, they
whipped him, they imprisoned him, they did everything but what was
Christian to him, all for his soul's health and the amendment of his
excesses.
"But men would not submit. To the argument that the State was a father to
the ignorant, they replied that it was at best the ignorant father of an
ignorant son, and that a blind man could find his way into a ditch without
another blind man to help him. And when the State said--But here we have
the Church, which knows all about it, the ignorant community declared that
it had a right to judge that question, and that it would judge it. It also
said that the Church was never one thing long, and that it progressed, on
the whole, rather more slowly than the ignorant community.
"The end of it was, in this country, that every one who chose taught all
who chose to let him teach, on condition only of an open and true
registration. The State was {268} allowed to patronize one particular
Church, so that no one need trouble himself to choose a pastor from the
mere necessity of choosing. But every church is allowed its colleges, its
studies, its diplomas; and every man is allowed his choice. There is no
proof that our souls are worse off than in the sixteenth century; and,
judging by fruits, there is much reason to hope they are better off.
"Now the little body question is a perfect parallel to the great soul
question in all its circumstances. The only things in which the parallel
fails are the following: Every one who believes in a future state sees that
the soul question is incomparably more important than the body question,
and every one can try the body question by experiment to a larger extent
than the soul question. The proverb, which always has a spark of truth at
the bottom, says that every man of forty is either a fool or a physician;
but did even the proverb maker ever dare to say that every man is at any
age either a fool or a fit teacher of religion?
"Common sense points out the following settlement of the medical question:
and to this it will come sooner or later.
"Let every man who chooses--subject to one common law of manslaughter for
all the _crass_ cases--doctor the bodies of all who choose to trust him,
and recover payment according to agreement in the courts of law. Provided
always that every person practising should be registered at a moderate fee
in a register to be republished every six months.
"Let the register give the name, address, and asserted qualification of
each candidate--as licentiate, or doctor, or what not, of this or that
college, hall, university, &c., home or foreign. Let it be competent to any
man to describe himself as qualified by study in public schools without a
diploma, or by private study, or even by intuition or divine inspiration,
if he please. But whatever he holds his qualification to be, that let him
declare. Let all qualification {269} which of its own nature admits of
proof be proved, as by the diploma or certificate, &c., leaving things
which cannot be proved, as asserted private study, intuition, inspiration,
&c., to work their own way.
"Let it be highly penal to assert to the patient any qualification which is
not in the register, and let the register be sold very cheap. Let the
registrar give each registered practitioner a copy of the register in his
own case; let any patient have the power to demand a sight of this copy;
and let no money for attendance be recoverable in any case in which there
has been false representation.
"Let any party in any suit have a right to produce what medical testimony
he pleases. Let the medical witness produce his register, and let his
evidence be for the jury, as is that of an engineer or a practitioner of
any art which is not attested by diplomas.
"Let any man who practises without venturing to put his name on the
register be liable to fine and imprisonment.
"The consequence would be that, as now, anybody who pleases might practise;
for the medical world is well aware that there is no power of preventing
what they call quacks from practising. But very different from what is now,
every man who practises would be obliged to tell the whole world what his
claim is, and would run a great risk if he dared to tell his patient in
private anything different from what he had told the whole world.
"The consequence would be that a real education in anatomy, physiology,
chemistry, surgery, and what is known of the thing called medicine, would
acquire more importance than it now has.
"It is curious to see how completely the medical man of the nineteenth
century squares with the priest of the sixteenth century. The clergy of all
sects are now better divines and better men than they ever were. They have
lost Bacon's reproach that they took a smaller measure of things than any
other educated men; and the physicians are now {270} in this particular the
rearguard of the learned world; though it may be true that the rear in our
day is further on in the march than the van of Bacon's day. Nor will they
ever recover the lost position until medicine is as free as religion.
"To this it must come. To this the public, which will decide for itself,
has determined it shall come. To this the public has, in fact, brought it,
but on a plan which it is not desirable to make permanent. We will be as
free to take care of our bodies as of our souls and of our goods. This is
the profession of all who sign as I do, and the practice of most of those
who would not like the name
"HETEROPATH."
The motion of the Sun in the Ecliptic, proved to be uniform in a
circular orbit ... with preliminary observations on the fallacy of the
Solar System. By Bartholomew Prescott,[596] 1825, 8vo.
The author had published, in 1803, a _Defence of the Divine System_, which
I never saw; also, _On the inverted scheme of Copernicus_. The above work
is clever in its satire.