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 John D. Works 
 
 To establish an independent health service. 
 
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TO ESTABLISH AN INDEPENDENT 
 HEALTH SERVICE 
 
 When a question like this confronts us the people of this country had 
 Letter look to their liberties. 
 
 " The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is not a medical body, has no 
 right to a medical opinion, and should not dare take sides in medical 
 controversies." — Prof. William James. 
 
 Jesus of Nazareth was persecuted and finally crucified for preaching 
 the Gospel and practicing his religions belief by healing the sick. To 
 do the same to-day in the twentieth century in the great State of New 
 York, if he were here, would make him a "criminal subject to fine and 
 imprisonment by the laws of that State. 
 
 SPEECH 
 
 HON. JOHN D. WORKS 
 
 OF CA.LIinOR]Sn:.A. 
 
 SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 
 
 MONDAY AND TUESDAY, APRIL 29 AND 30, 1912 
 
 4^ 
 
 4\ 
 
 41017—10900 
 
 WASHINGTON 
 1912 
 
 • JoitttBbia XJnirt 
 
"K 
 
 President's Office G. 
 
 \<i\2 
 
 
 
SPEECH 
 
 OF 
 
 HON. JOHN d. WORKS, 
 
 Monday and Tuesday, April 29 and 30, 1912. 
 
 On the bill (S. 1) to establish an independent Health Service, and for 
 other purposes — 
 
 Mr. WORKS said: 
 
 Mr. President : I had the honor, soon after I became a Mem- 
 ber of this body, to discuss this bill from the standpoint of 
 Christian Scientists, to whom, in its then form, it was most ob- 
 jectionable. Since then it has been amended in a number of 
 material particulars, relieving it, in some respects, from the 
 objections then urged against it. At this time I desire- to con- 
 sider it in a broader and more comprehensive way, as it affects 
 not Christian Scientists alone but the whole people. This will 
 necessarily lead me to comment not only upon the bill as it 
 appears on its face, but upon the forces and motives behind 
 it, and the ultimate objects and purposes of this movement, who 
 want it, and what for. 
 
 I am sorry that I feel myself impelled by a sense of duty to 
 say some unpleasant things, but I shall say them as pleasantly 
 as I can, and without any intention of giving offense. I shall 
 have to question and challenge some of the most cherished be- 
 liefs and convictions of Members of this body and of many 
 other good people, convictions sincerely and honestly enter- 
 tained by them. But I am happy to say that I entertain no 
 sense of malice, hatred, or ill will toward any human being, 
 alive or dead, or of unfriendly antagonism toward the views, 
 honestly entertained, of any man. I shall not hesitate, how- 
 ever, to speak my own convictions freely and frankly and to 
 point out and comment without reserve upon some of the evils 
 that are attempted to be maintained and perpetuated by this 
 bill and legislation which is expected to follow it. 
 
 I shall feel myself called upon to assail the motives and 
 conduct of members of the medical profession, in their organ- 
 ized form, as the American Medical Association. But this is in 
 no sense a personal matter, nor is it prompted by any sense of 
 ill will. There are many high-minded, noble, self-sacrificing 
 men and women in the profession who are conscientiously de- 
 voting their lives to the healing of disease and the amelioration 
 of human suffering. In what I shall say on this subject, I am 
 not speaking of such as these, but of the self-seeking, intolerant 
 political doctors who are serving their own selfish interests 
 and not the public good. 
 
 The avowed purpose of seeking new legislation was, in the 
 beginning, to establish a department of Government with a 
 41917—10969 a 
 
doctor of medicine at its head, a member of the President's 
 Cabinet, possessed of the almost autocratic, unlimited, and 
 unrestrained power belonging to such a department. This 
 movement was instigated and maintained by' the American 
 Medical Association, one of the most powerful trusts, in its 
 management, in the country. While there were many sincere 
 and honest, but misguided, people inside and outside of the 
 association behind it, the motive power which was pressing it 
 forward was this political branch of the association. Its officials 
 and agents, with their powerful organization, were simply 
 using its members and others less selfish and unpopular to de- 
 ceive the public and Congress and conceal the real motives that 
 actuated the effort. This motive and the real object, purely 
 selfish on their part, were studiously and skillfully concealed 
 under the mask of humanitarianism. The League for. Medical 
 Freedom, a voluntary organization composed of hundreds of 
 thousands of citizens o'f all classes in all walks of life, knowing 
 the hypocrisy of the instigators of new legislation on this sub- 
 ject, made common cause against it and have exposed its ob- 
 jects and pointed out the injurious effects of the passage of the 
 proposed bill. One of the chief causes of complaint was that 
 it would create a monopoly in one school of medicine, with 
 one of their number, a Cabinet officer, at its head, to the exclu- 
 sion of every other school of medicine or other modes of healing. 
 This purpose was disclaimed by the author of the bill, the Sen- 
 ator from Oklahoma [Mr. Owen], but the form of the bill, the 
 fact that then and now all surgeons and other medical em- 
 ployees of the Government were and are of that school of 
 medicine, to the exclusion of all others, and the declarations of 
 parties interested in the bill as to their ultimate object and 
 purpose in urging the passage of it showed conclusively that 
 the Senator from Oklahoma was entirely mistaken. 
 
 It became so apparent that such was the purpose, and it was 
 so obnoxious to every man who believes in medical as well as 
 religious freedom, that friends of the bill voluntarily offered 
 the following amendment to relieve it from this objection 
 which they soon found would defeat it : 
 
 And provided further, That the bureau of health established by this 
 act shall have no power to regulate the practice of medicine or the 
 practice of healing or to interfere with the right of a citizen to employ 
 the practitioner of his choice, and all appointments within the bureau, 
 including the head of the bureau, shall be made without discrimination 
 against any school of medicine or of healing. 
 
 They soon found, also, that the effort to secure a place in 
 the Cabinet and make the health bureau a department of the 
 Government was hopeless, and that was abandoned. 
 
 Thus shorn of the things they most desired, the bill has be- 
 come unnecessary and useless. It adds no power to the several 
 bureaus in the different departments intended to protect and 
 preserve the public health, and can not increase their activities, 
 except that of collecting and disseminating information. , There- 
 fore, if I did not know that this abandonment of the objection- 
 able features of the bill was for the ulterior purpose of making 
 it a beginning and then following it up step by step until they 
 have attained their original object, which they could not reach 
 41917— 10'JCO 
 
by direct action, I should have but little reason to cousume the 
 time of the Senate in opposing its passage. 
 
 But, Mr. President, I know what I am talking about when I 
 say to the Senate that they have never abandoned their original 
 purpose of taking over into their own hands the medical activ- 
 ities of the Government and of confining their administration 
 and the enforcement of their powers in the one school of medi- 
 cine to the exclusion of all others. As I shall show the Senate 
 a little later, some of these doctors and their publications, less 
 discreet than some others, have made the most startling state- 
 ments of their intention to establish and control a state medi- 
 cine in its most extreme and objectionable form. Since the bill 
 has been amended, as I have stated, I said to one of the most 
 earnest supporters of the idea of a department of medicine, and 
 a distinguished citizen and educator, " Why do you want this 
 bill in its amended form? It does not increase the powers of 
 the medical bureaus or accomplish anything you want." He 
 said, " It is not satisfactory to us, but it will be a beginning 
 and we will follow it up until we get what we want," or words 
 to that effect. 
 
 This was a frank and perfectly honest declaration of their 
 purpose and intention, and their reason, and the only plausible 
 reason, for accepting a bill with everything that they really 
 wauted taken out of it by amendment. 
 
 Therefore, Mr. President, I am going to consider this bill 
 precisely as if it provided in terms for the things to which I 
 so seriously object, because that is the ultimate purpose which 
 should be met at the outset, and this bill is only one step to- 
 ward its final accomplishment. But for the final object in view 
 the bill would not be worth the attention .of its alleged friends. 
 
 Mr. President, there are various healing agencies at work in 
 this country to-day. Some are schools of medical healing which 
 depend upon drugs as the means of cure. Others depend upon 
 manipulation of the body ; others depend upon the action of 
 one mind upon another as a means of healing ; and still an- 
 other upon the operation of the Divine mind in the establish- 
 ment of harmony, the regeneration of man and his restoration 
 to health by that means. To the latter the use of drugs is 
 regarded as a menace to life and health and opposed to their 
 conscientious religious beliefs. 
 
 These different schools and other modes of healing may be 
 divided into groups. It is impossible in the scope of such an 
 address as this to consider or even mention them all. I will, 
 therefore, confine myself to a few of the leading ones of each 
 class. In the schools of healing by drugs may be named the 
 allopaths, the homeopaths, and the eclectics. The healing by 
 the action of one mind over another may be classed under the 
 general designation of mesmerism, hypnotism, or suggestion — all 
 meaning practically the same thing — and Christian Science, 
 the one distinctive mode of healing by the operation of the 
 Divine mind according to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. 
 
 No two of these schools of medicine, or other modes of heal- 
 ing, agree with each other. While some of them agree in the 
 use of drugs as a means of healing, they are entirely at variance 
 as to the kinds of medicines to be used, the quantity to be ad- 
 ministered, and the principle upon which the system of drug 
 41917—10069 
 
healing is based. The allopathic school of medicine is the oldest 
 and best known. Its devotees are wholly dogmatic and intoler- 
 ant. They assume that there is no other efficacious mode of 
 healing but theirs, and that all other practitioners are incom- 
 petents and a menace to the public health. They have formed 
 one of the most powerful organizations of any kind in the 
 country. They are ruthlessly using that power not to improve 
 the practitioners of their own school only but to coerce all 
 people to accept their remedies and to suppress, by law and by 
 persecution, the practice of other means of healing. The 
 American Medical Association is working in every State in the 
 Union to secure laws which will prevent any but practitioners 
 of their school from practicing the art of healing. They have 
 secured such laws in some of the States, as I shall show farther 
 along, and are tireless in their efforts to secure other like re- 
 strictive laws in all other States. Having only partially suc- 
 ceeded in their efforts in this direction in the States, they have 
 for a long time been besieging Congress to help them to - entrench 
 themselves with all the powers of the Government behind them 
 where they will be supreme and may absolutely exclude all 
 other practitioners than theirs from the practice of healing. 
 They are using all the money and influence they can bring to 
 bear and are practicing on the credulity of an ignorant public 
 sentiment by the pretense that all of this is for the public good. 
 Through their efforts the much-dreaded practice of vaccination, 
 which has, in my opinion, sacrificed more lives than it has saved 
 and maimed and made invalids of thousands, has been made 
 compulsory by law: and now other serum remedies, alleged to 
 be preventives of various diseases and equally dangerous, loath- 
 some, and objectionable, are being forced upon the people 
 whether they want them or not. 
 
 The officers of the Army and Navy are the willing instruments 
 ©f these medical men to compel American citizens to submit to 
 be poisoned with their loathsome preparations. If a soldier or 
 sailor refuses to submit to vaccination or other serum treat- 
 ment for typhoid fever and other diseases, he is promptly dis- 
 missed the service, or placed in irons uutil he submits, or is 
 otherwise punished. And now these doctors want Congress to 
 so legislate as to give them full control of the medical, sani- 
 tary, and hygienic activities and bureaus of the Government 
 that their powers may be complete. 
 
 The doctors of this school hold every medical position in the 
 Government, to the exclusion of every other school, and no one 
 who believes in the prevention or healing of disease by any 
 other means than theirs need apply. 
 
 Mr. President, the one great trouble is that the people do not 
 think for themselves in any matter affecting the public health. 
 They have preferred to rely upon the doctors and to be guided 
 and controlled by them. Public officials and the Congress of 
 the United States do not trouble themselves about it or hold 
 themselves responsible. They generally evince a sublime indif- 
 ference to the subject beyond what the doctors say or recom- 
 mend, and the people are fleeced of millions of dollars in al- 
 leged works for the public health which had better be thrown 
 away. They have much more faith in the doctors than the 
 doctors have in themselves or in each other. The competent 
 41017— 10960 
 
doctor has long since learned that drugs are a poison and that 
 they do not heal. Consequently the conscientious doctor no 
 longer gives or advises the giving or taking of drugs. But the 
 incompetent and selfish and unworthy still makes his living that 
 way. 
 
 The allopathic school of medicine is noted for the quantity of 
 medicines they administer and their nauseous and distasteful 
 character — so much so that their mode of treatment is often 
 characterized as cruel and inhuman. So deleterious and harm- 
 ful are their drugs that the homeopaths claim that a large part 
 of their practice comes from those who have* temporarily or 
 permanently suffered from the effects of allopathic drugs. But 
 I am glad to say that the better and more intelligent physicians 
 of their school have given up the use of their strong drugs in 
 a great degree. Their experience has taught them that such 
 drugs do not heal, but engender and cause disease. Let us 
 hope that they may soon reach that degree of intelligence that 
 will lead them to cease the use of any drugs altogether. It 
 would be a blessing to the human race if they would at the 
 same time teach their patients to know what they have learned, 
 that an inanimate drug has no healing quality and had better 
 not be used. The people have been erroneously taught to rely 
 upon drugs for their healing and have blindly believed in them 
 so long that to deprive them of them would be disastrous until 
 they learn that lesson. Drugs and the drug doctors' ministra- 
 tion of them have healed disease only because of the faith of 
 the patient in the doctor and his drugs, and for no other reason. 
 Doctors themselves bear witness to this fact. 
 
 In speaking of this subject, Dr. William Osier, formerly of 
 Johns Hopkins Medical School, in an article in the Americana, 
 uses this language : 
 
 Yet after all the psychical method has always played an important 
 though largely unrecognized part in therapeutics. It is from faith, 
 which buoys up the spirits, sets the blood flowing more freely, and the 
 nerves playing their parts without disturbance, that a large part of all 
 cures arises. Despondency, or lack of faith, will often sink the stoutest 
 constitution almost to death's door ; faith will enable a bread pill or a 
 spoonful of clear water to do almost miracles of healing when the best 
 medicines have been given over in despair. The basis of the entire 
 profession of medicine is faith in the doctor and his drugs and his 
 methods. This is no new discovery. It was said by Galen that " he 
 works the most cures in whom most have faith," and the doctor-chemist- 
 charlatan Paracelsus, who died of taking a universal panacea too 
 poisonous even for his confidence, told his patients to have full faith 
 and a strong imagination and they would see the effects of it. 
 
 This is strong language to come from such a source. The 
 truth of it will not be denied by any well-informed and con- 
 scientious medical practitioner. 
 
 I ask the Senate to consider carefully this one statement con- 
 tained in this article: 
 
 The basis of the entire profession of medicine is faith in the doctor 
 and his drugs and his methods. 
 
 That is a remarkable statement. It comes from an eminent 
 and noted medical practitioner of the allopathic school, and is 
 a permanent contribution to the mass of information on the 
 subject tbat can not be entered upon here, appearing as it does 
 in one of the leading modern encyclopedias. 
 41917—10969 
 
8 
 
 Mr. President, I may be pardoned if I stop here to point out 
 tlie difference between the patients of medical practitioners and 
 Christian Scientists in respect of this question of faith. The 
 believer in the doctor and his drugs has faith in a human being 
 and his means of cure, while the Christian Scientist has un- 
 shaken and supreme faith in the omnipotence and beneficent 
 influence of the Divine Being in the healing of disease. I leave 
 it to the candid judgment of Senators to say which of these is 
 most worthy of faith and trust. But the Christian Scientist 
 does not rest on faith alone, but upon such understanding as he 
 has of the power of God to heal and upon good works by which 
 that healing may be brought about. 
 
 The drugging system of the homeopathic school of medicine 
 is entirely different from that of the allopathic school and is 
 founded on a wholly different principle. I have no doubt its 
 rise was largely due to the protest against the cruel and in- 
 human practices of the old school. 
 
 There are some commendable features of homeopathic medica- 
 tion as compared with the old school. Their medicines are less 
 in quantity and not so nauseous or distasteful, and while they 
 can no more heal disease, except by faith, than can the allo- 
 pathic drugs, they are far less injurious to the human system. 
 They are less harmful to humanity, and that is a good deal. 
 
 Then came the modern school of eclectics. The theory of 
 practice adopted by this school is entirely different from the 
 others. Its founder and his followers were still searching for 
 a better means of healing disease and saving human life. 
 And still mankind is not satisfied. It is beginning to be under- 
 stood now by all medical practitioners that the one great thing 
 to be done is not to heal disease, in which they have signally 
 failed, but to prevent it They have learned, too, that the way 
 to prevent disease is not by the use of drugs, in the form of 
 serums or otherwise, but in removing the extraneous causes 
 of disease and preventing them from reaching the human body. 
 It is generally believed by all civilized and enlightened people 
 that lack of sanitation is, as men see things, one of the most 
 prolific causes of disease and death. To this all schools of 
 medicine and healing agree. Veritably cleanliness is next to 
 godliness. But sanitation is not so much the work of the doctors 
 or other practitioners as it is of the skilled sanitary engineer. It 
 is claimed to have been discovered that the sting of the mosquito 
 causes yellow fever, the bite of the fly typhoid fever, and that 
 the ground squirrel is the carrier of bubonic plague. "What is 
 the remedy? Obviously, to exterminate the mosquito, the Gy, 
 and the ground squirrel. This does not require the services of 
 a doctor or the use of a drug. When either of these breeders 
 and disseminators of disease escapes and the disease is trans- 
 mitted to the human body, the doctor, with his drugs, is help- 
 less to give relief. 
 
 Going a little further in respect of the different modes of 
 healing, we have the osteopathic school. It does not rely upon 
 or use drugs, but relies on the intrinsic powers of the human 
 body itself to restore healthy conditions. 
 
 We have also the practice of hypnotism, mesmerism, and 
 suggestion. This alleged means of healing, including " sugges- 
 tion," so called, is very largely used now by the old-school phy- 
 41917— 109G9 
 
9 
 
 sieian. It is an admission of the inefficacy of drugs. But it is 
 even more dangerous in its use than the drugs themselves. 
 
 In 1SG6 the principle of healing, which is known as Christian 
 Science, came into use, and is very generally practiced. It, 
 too, discards the use of drugs. Unlike all the other modes of 
 healing that I have mentioned, it is religious in its character. 
 The healing is not its religion, but is incidental to and results 
 from its religion. Its healing is not confined to its own religious 
 believers, but is open to all men. 
 
 MOTIVE FOE ACTIVITY OF AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 
 
 There is abundant evidence, which can not be reviewed here, 
 that the efforts of the American Medical Association to secure 
 restrictive legislation affecting other schools of healing and 
 legislation giving its school additional powers and privileges are 
 selfish in the extreme and intolerant and oppressive, as I shall 
 show further along. The motive of this is not far to seek. 
 Of later years, not only have the more modern schools of medi- 
 cine encroached upon the business of the allopathic doctors and 
 interfered with their receipts, but thousands — yes, millions — of 
 people in this country have learned not to use medicines in any 
 form, much to their advantage in the way of economy and bet- 
 ter health. As a result, inroads of the most serious nature 
 have been made on the doctor's business and profits, besides 
 bringing their practice into serious discredit. It was perfectly 
 apparent that something must be done to save their credit and 
 prevent the overthrow of their system of practice, It was a 
 desperate case, and they have resorted to desperate and ques- 
 tionable means to protect their profession from ruin. This 
 movement is not in the interest of humanity, as they would 
 have us believe, but to uphold the prestige and protect the re- 
 sources of the doctors of the old school of medicine. Their own 
 declarations prove this beyond controversy. I shall a little 
 further along submit for the consideration of the Senate some 
 of their own declarations to that effect, to which others, almost 
 without number, might be added, if it were necessary, coupled 
 with the most startling statements of the extraordinary means 
 resorted to to accomplish their object. 
 
 There is no public demand for this legislation. There is no 
 sentiment in favor of it except that of one school of medicine 
 and such as they have manufactured in their own selfish in- 
 terests under the hypocritical pretense that it is for the public 
 good. 
 
 HOW THEY OPEEATH. 
 
 The doctors of the old school had possession. The people 
 had become dependent upon them for help because they had not 
 3"et learned a better way. It was the fear that they would find 
 a better way that spurred them to action. They have not been 
 willing to stand upon their merits and be judged by their fruits; 
 they have fought and persecuted every new school or mode of 
 healing. They have appealed to the legislatures of the States 
 for laws that were prohibitory of other schools and making the 
 practice of medicine by them a crime, and have succeeded in 
 many of the States in procuring such legislation. Their favorite 
 scheme is to have established a board of health in every State, 
 41917—10069 
 
10 
 
 and «very county in every State, composed of doctors of their 
 school, and then procure a law making it a criminal offense to 
 practice medicine or healing without first securing a license to 
 practice from their board of health. They opposed and perse- 
 cuted the homeopaths, the eclectics, and the osteopaths in turn, 
 denouncing them as charlatans, quacks, and incompetents. None 
 of these could, in the beginning of these tactics, procure one of 
 their licenses to practice. But this did not work very long. As 
 these other schools of medicine became stronger and better ap- 
 preciated by the people legislatures refused to pass these pro- 
 hibitory laws, and governors of States sometimes vetoed them 
 if they were passed. 
 
 The new schools have forced their way into public favor, 
 notwithstanding all this unjust opposition, and now other 
 schools of medicine are given places on boards of health and 
 applicants for licenses to practice by physicians of their schools 
 are given separate examinations by members of their own pro- 
 fession. Every new school or method of healing has been com- 
 pelled to meet with this same kind of unjust opposition and per- 
 secution, and much of it has been accomplished through the 
 legislatures of the States. Many of the better class of allo- 
 pathic physicians have deplored and opposed this mode of meet- 
 ing opposition. It has been done mostly by and through the 
 American Medical Association. To secure such restrictive and 
 prohibitory legislation has been one of the chief objects of the 
 association. Of later years their efforts have been directed 
 more particularly against the Christian Scientists. The associa- 
 tion has its branches and emissaries in every State and every 
 city of any size in every State. They infest the legislatures of 
 every State in the Union and present bills at every session until 
 they succeed in securing the restrictive laws they want. At this 
 present day they generally fail, but they continue their efforts 
 with an energy and persistency worthy of a better cause. In 
 some of the States, notably in Maryland, Ohio, and Missouri, 
 they have made it a crime for a Christian Scientist to practice 
 healing or to accept compensation therefor. 
 
 A conspicuous illustration of their methods may be found in 
 a late order procured by the doctors affecting the Panama Canal 
 Zone. They had an allopathic board of health, with a former 
 president of the American Medical Association at its head. 
 They procured from the President an order in the following 
 form : 
 
 EXECUTIVE ORDER TO PROHIBIT THE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE, SDRGERT, 
 DENTISTRY, PHARMACY, OR MIDWIFERY WITHOUT A LICENSE. 
 
 By virtue of the authority vested in me, I hereby establish the fol- 
 lowing order for the Canal Zone : 
 
 Section 1. It shall be unlawful for any person to practice or attempt 
 to practice medicine, surgery, dentistry, pharmacy, or midwifery within 
 the Canal Zone without first having obtained a license therefor from 
 the Board of Health of the Canal Zone. Any person thus offending 
 shall be punished by a fine not exceeding twenty-five dollars ($25) or by 
 imprisonment in jail not exceeding thirty (30) days, or by both such fine 
 and imprisonment, in the discretion of the court: Provided. That this 
 order shall not apply to commissioned surgeons of the United States 
 Army and Navy or Marine-Hospital Service, nor to physicians, surgeons, 
 dentists, or pharmacists and their assistants and nurses employed by the 
 Isthmian Canal Commission, nor to nurses acting under the orders of a 
 licensed physician 
 
 Sec 2. Any person shall be regarded as practicing medicine within 
 the meaning of this order who shall prescribe for, operate on, or in 
 41917— 109G9 
 
11 
 
 any wise attempt to heal, cure, or alleviate, or wbo shall in any wise 
 treat any disease or any physical or mental ailment of another: 
 Provided', That nothing in this order shall be construed to prohibit 
 gratuitous services in case of emergency or to the administering of 
 ordinary household remedies. 
 
 Sec. 3. This order shall take effect sixty (GO) days from and after 
 this date. 
 
 Wm. H. Taft. 
 
 The WniTE House, October V H , 1911, 
 
 It will be seen that the5 r so defined the practice of medicine 
 in this order as to make it a crime to attempt to ameliorate 
 sickness or disease in any form or by any means other than 
 their own. 
 
 Section 2 of the order would have had the effect to exclude 
 from practice in the Canal Zone eTery school of medicine except 
 the allopathic school, including Christian Scientists and any 
 and all persons who attempted to cure disease or alleviate 
 suffering in any way by prayer or any means not included in 
 the term " practicing medicine." 
 
 Section 3 provided in express terms " that any person shall 
 be regarded as practicing medicine within the meaning of this 
 order who shall in any wise attempt to heal, cure, or alleviate, 
 or who shall in any wise treat any disease or any physical or 
 mental ailment of another." There was no exemption what- 
 ever made of any mode of treatment The evident purpose of 
 the order, as drawn, was to give the allopathic school of medi- 
 cine absolute and unlimited control of medical affairs in the 
 Canal Zone to the exclusion of every other mode of healing. 
 
 When the attention of the President was called to this fact 
 he said at once that he had understood that Christian Scientists 
 were not to be disturbed in their practice by the order, and that 
 if it could be construed as having that effect he would see that 
 it was modified. The matter was taken up with the President 
 and the Secretary of War, who gave it the most careful and con- 
 scientious attention, and finally modified the order by inserting 
 the following clause: 
 
 Provided, That nothing Sn this order shall be construed to prohibit 
 (a) the practice of the religious tenets of any church in the adminis- 
 tration of the sick or suffering by mental or spiritual means without 
 the use of any drug or material remedy, whether gratuitously or for 
 compensation, provided that such sanitary laws, orders, rules, and 
 regulations as now are, or hereafter may be, in force in said Canal 
 Zone are complied with. 
 
 Christian Scientists made no objection to the provision in the 
 order protecting the sanitary regulations of the Canal Zone and 
 their enforcement, but frankly said to the President and Secre- 
 tary of War that they believed in sanitation, and that the order 
 might be made as strong with respect to that matter as they de- 
 sired to have it. 
 
 But, Mr. President, this Canal Zone order was not the only 
 law, by many, obtained and attempted to be obtained by the 
 American Medical Association. Every State in the Union has 
 some law regulating the practice of medicine and surgery, aind 
 every State has a State board of health or examiners from whom 
 a license must be obtained to entitle, anyone to practice medicine 
 or surgery. The doctors have gone to extraordinary lengths in 
 the attempt to protect themselves in a monopoly of healing and. 
 to exclude from the exercise of their rights all other modes of 
 41917— 109G9 
 
1? 
 
 healing than their own. In the procurement of hoards of health, 
 either State or county, the allopathic physicians, acting through 
 the American Medical Association, usually have boards com- 
 posed solely of their school of medicine, or, if other schools are 
 allowed to be represented, as they are now in many of the 
 States, the allopathic school, usually called by themselves " reg- 
 ulars," invariably have there a majority or a greater number of 
 members on the board than that of any other school of medicine. 
 
 In some of the States separate boards of examiners or health 
 boards are provided for three different schools of medicine, 
 namely, the regular or allopathic school, homeopaths, and eclec- 
 tics. But in no instance, so far as I know, is a majority of 
 members, where there is but one board, given to any but the 
 regular school. Having procured a board of examiners, or board 
 of health, as they are sometimes called, they seek legislation in 
 the different States providing that no one shall practice medi- 
 cine or surgery until they have procured a license so to do from 
 such board. To this Christian Scientists would make no objec- 
 tion, as they are not practicing medicine or surgery, and their 
 mode of treatment is not within the scope of the title to these 
 various bills. They are almost invariably given the title of bills 
 " to regulate the practice of medicine and surgery," and some- 
 times midwifery, as indicated in the title. But they meet this 
 situation by providing expressly what shall be included in the 
 term " practice of medicine and surgery," and so define the term 
 as to include modes of healing and practice that are not within 
 the meaning of the words at all. 
 
 It may be interesting to the Senate to follow in a brief way 
 the course of legislation on this subject. 
 
 With respect to the body of the laws for regulation of the 
 practice of medicine and surgery, these laws, with very few 
 exceptions, provide, first, that no one shall practice without first 
 having obtained a license from the board established by the act. 
 Then they provide just who and what kinds of practice shall 
 be included within the terms of the statute. The ingenuity dis- 
 played by these political doctors who have been lobbying for 
 years in every legislature in this country in their effort to in- 
 sert in these laws some provision that will maintain their mo- 
 nopoly of the practice and exclude everybody else, challenges 
 my admiration. The fact that many of such laws are in exactly 
 the same language shows conclusively that they have been the 
 work of one moving power. 
 
 I am goiug to trouble the Senate by a brief review of these 
 different statutory provisions. They are exceedingly interest- 
 ing. Of course where the statute contains no definition of the 
 practice of medicine and surgery, no mode of healing that does 
 not use drugs or the knife would be included in its terms or 
 affected in any way. Some of the States have left them just 
 in that condition, and therefore such modes of healing may be 
 practiced in those States beyond doubt. 
 
 But, taking up the States in their order: In Alabama no 
 exemption is contained in the statute affecting the question I 
 am now discussing, and the definition of a practitioner within 
 the meaning of the act is as follows : 
 
 Any person who treats or offers to treat diseases of human beings 
 by any system whatsoever is considered to be practicing medicine. 
 41017— 109G9 
 
13 
 
 Nothing could be more absurd or unjust than this. Everyone 
 knows that the Christian Science mode of practice, for exam- 
 ple, is not practicing medicine, because they do not believe in 
 medicines of any kind — do not use them or prescribe them — but 
 are conscientiously opposed to their use. That a legislature 
 of a State should falsify the facts, as is done in an act of this 
 kind, in order to exclude people who are conscientiously en- 
 deavoring to heal disease and who have brought health, happiness, 
 and contentment to thousands and thousands of people notwith- 
 standing these restrictive laws, is almost beyond comprehension. 
 It has been done at the instigation of medical practitioners, act- 
 ing through the American Medical Association, whose attempt is 
 to selfishly retain in themselves a monopoly of healing and 
 exclude everyone else. It is singular that the legislature of a 
 State should allow itself to be used in any such way. 
 
 In Arkansas no exemption is made, and when I say no ex- 
 emption is made I mean as affecting the question which I am. 
 now considering, and in defining the scope of the act it is made 
 to include anyone who — 
 
 prescribes or directs for the use of any person or persons any drug 
 or medicine or other agency lor the treatment, cure, or relief of any 
 bodily injury, deformity, or disease. 
 
 In California Christian Scientists are excluded from the ef- 
 fects of the statute. 
 In the State of Colorado the exempting clause provides : 
 
 The act does not prohibit gratuitous service in case of emergency, 
 nor the practice of the religious tenets of any church. 
 
 Under this exemption the courts of Colorado have held that 
 it applies only to the exercise of religion by a church as a 
 body, and therefore it does not exempt or protect a Christian 
 Science practitioner, who exercises the right of healing, from 
 the penalties of the statute. 
 
 In the following States, be it said to their credit, Christian 
 Science is exempted from the provisions of the statute, in 
 express terms: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, 
 North Dakota, and South Dakota. 
 
 In the following States the definition of the act includes the 
 following provision, either in the same words or words having 
 the same meaning and effect: Delaware, Michigan, Minnesota* 
 Nevada, and New Mexico : 
 
 * * * to suggest, recommend, prescribe, or direct for the use of 
 any person any drug, medicine, appliance, or other agency, whether 
 material or not material, for the cure, relief, or palliation of any ail- 
 ment or disease of the mind or the body. 
 
 In the District of Columbia there is no definition of the 
 meaning of the term " practicing medicine or surgery," and 
 therefore Christian Scientists, of course, are not included 
 within its provisions or penalties. The same is true of a num- 
 ber of the States. 
 
 In Georgia the act is made to include : 
 
 Any person practicing medicine or surgery who prescribes for the 
 sick or those in need of medical or surgical aid and who charge or 
 receive therefor money or other compensation or consideration directly 
 or indirectly. 
 
 41017—10069 
 
14 
 
 The meaning and effect of that statute, of course, turns upon 
 the word " prescribes," which, I assume, would apply only to 
 medical treatment. 
 
 The statute covering Hawaii includes: 
 
 * * * any means or method or any agent, either tangible or in- 
 tangible, for the treatment of disease in the human subject. 
 
 The language of the statute of Idaho, in defining the scope of 
 the act, is not as clear as it should be, but according to my con- 
 struction of it it includes only (as every statute of this kind 
 should) medical or surgical practitioners. 
 
 In the State of Illinois this exempting clause is found in the 
 statute : 
 
 Nothing in this act applies to * * * any person who adminis- 
 ters to or treats the sick or suffering by mental or spiritual means 
 without the use of any drug or material remedy. 
 
 In Indiana there is no exemption and— 
 
 * * * to heal, cure, or relieve, or to attempt to heal, cure, or 
 relieve, those suffering from injury, or deformity, or disease of mind or 
 body — ■ 
 
 Is included in the term " practice of medicine " within the 
 meaning of the act. 
 
 In Iowa there is no exemption, and it is provided in the act 
 that— 
 
 Anyone Is regarded as a physician who publicly professes to be a 
 physician, surgeon, or obstetrician and assumes the duties thereof, or 
 who makes a practice of prescribing and furnishing medicine for the 
 sick, or who publicly professes to cure or heal. 
 
 In Kansas the exempting clause is as follows: 
 Nothing in this act shall he construed as interfering with any reli- 
 gious beliefs in the treatment of disease : Provided, That quarantine 
 regulations relating to contagious diseases are not infringed on. 
 
 In Kentucky the definition of the act includes persons who 
 shall— 
 
 treat or attempt to treat any sick or afflicted person by any system or 
 method whatsoever for reward or compensation, or to announce to the 
 public in any way a readiness to treat the sick or afflicted. 
 
 But Christian Scientists are excepted by name. 
 
 In Louisiana there is this exemption : 
 
 Nothing in this act, however, shall be construed to prohibit the prac- 
 tice of the religious tenets of any church whatsoever. 
 
 In Maine Christian Scientists and osteopaths are expressly 
 exempted from the terms of the act, together with — 
 any other method of healing, if no poisonous or dangerous drugs are 
 employed nor surgical operations performed. 
 
 In the State of Maryland the medical boards certainly have 
 full control, for it is provided in express terms that Christian 
 Scientists are not exempted from the terms of the statute. 
 
 In Michigan no exemption is made, and the act is made to 
 Include all persons who — ■ 
 
 attempt to diagnose, cure, or relieve any human disease, ailment, defect, 
 or complaint, whether of physical or mental origin, by attendance or 
 by advice, or by prescribing or furnishing any drug, medicine, appli- 
 ance, manipulation, or method, or by any therapeutic agent whatsoever. 
 
 There is no exemption in Minnesota, and the defining clause 
 of the statute includes any — 
 
 agency for the treatment, care, or relief of any wound, fracture, or 
 bodily injury, infirmity, or disease. 
 
 In Mississippi there is no exemption and no definition of the 
 meaning of the terms of the act, in which case, of course, Chris- 
 41017—10969 
 
15 
 
 tian Scientists are exempt ad because they are not practicing 
 medicine. 
 
 In Missouri there is no exemption, and the definition includes— 
 * * * any person attempting to treat the sick or others afflicted 
 with bodily or mental infirmities. 
 
 I shall come to the State of Missouri a little further along 
 and disclose to the Senate the extent to which the board of 
 health of the city of St. Louis has gone in attempting to sup- 
 press the practice of Christian Science under this statute. 
 
 There is no exemption in the State of Montana, and the act 
 is made to apply to any— 
 
 agency, whether material or not material, for the care, relief, or pal- 
 liation of any ailment or disease of the mind or body, or for the cure 
 or relief of any wound, fracture, or bodily injury or other deformity, 
 after having received, or with the intention of receiving, therefor, 
 either directly or indirectly, any bonus, gift, or compensation. 
 
 In a number of the States the right to practice Christian 
 Science is made to turn upon the question of compensation. It 
 was conceived that a law absolutely forbidding Christian 
 Scientists to heal disease would be unconstitutional, and in 
 order to avoid that contingency it was believed that they might 
 be prevented from practicing by forbidding them to receive any 
 compensation for their services. In that the legislatures and 
 the doctors who procured this kind of legislation have been 
 greatly mistaken. Christian Scientists do not practice the heal- 
 ing for money alone, and the practice of healing by them is 
 gradually and steadily increasing in all of the States where 
 this unjust provision has been made by law. 
 
 In Nebraska the law contains no exemption, and has this 
 provision defining the scope of the act: 
 
 Any person shall be regarded as practicing medicine who shall op- 
 erate or profess to heal or prescribe for or otherwise treat any phys- 
 ical or mental ailment of another. 
 
 The statute in the State of Nevada contains the provision 
 above mentioned in the State of Montana, and almost in the 
 exact language. 
 
 In the New Jersey statute the language is peculiar. There 
 is no exemption affecting this question, and this provision is 
 inserted in the definition clause: 
 
 The act applies to all persons professing and attempting to cure 
 diseases by means of the so-called systems of " faith curism," " mind 
 healing/' " laying on of hands," and other similar systems. 
 
 I do not know whether or not the distinguished lawmakers 
 of the State of New Jersey understood that Christian Scientists 
 would be included in that category. Certainly they would not 
 place themselves there. So far as I know, the courts of that 
 State have not been called upon to determine what is in- 
 cluded in that definition. 
 
 In the provision in the New Mexico statute, in defining the 
 words " practice of medicine," the language is precisely the 
 same as I have stated for Montana and Nevada. 
 
 In New York this clause is inserted in the definition of the 
 practice of medicine: Anyone — 
 
 who shall either offer or undertake by any means or method to diagnose, 
 treat, operate, or prescribe for any human disease, pain, injury, de- 
 formity, or physical condition. 
 
 North Carolina has no definition and therefore does not affect 
 the rights of Christian Scientists. 
 41917—10069 
 
16 
 
 In Ohio the defining clause is made to include any person 
 who administers — 
 
 treatment of whatever nature for the cure or relief of a wound, frac- 
 ture, or bodily injury, infirmity, or disease — 
 
 for a compensation. 
 
 This clause in the Ohio statute has been construed by the 
 courts to apply to Christian Scientists, and they are positively 
 forbidden in that State to practice healing for a consideration. 
 
 In Oklahoma the defining clause limits the operation of the 
 statute to the practice of medicine and surgery in the proper 
 sense of those terms, and therefore does not prohibit other 
 modes of healing. 
 
 The State of Oregon may be regarded as in the same con- 
 dition, except that the language of the defining clause of the 
 statute is somewhat ambiguous and uncertain. 
 
 In Pennsylvania, again, there is no defining clause. 
 
 The statute of the Philippine Islands is made to apply to any- 
 one who shall " treat " any person for any ailment. 
 
 In Porto Rico the language of the statute is almost precisely 
 the same as that of Montana and Nevada. 
 
 The State of Rhode Island has a reasonable and proper defini- 
 tion of the practice of medicine and surgery, and does not pro- 
 hibit other modes of healing. 
 
 The language of the South Carolina statute is the same as 
 that of the Philippine Islands. 
 
 The statute of Tennessee is made to apply to anyone who 
 " treats or professes to treat " any person for any physical 
 ailment, the same as in the Philippines and Porto Rico. 
 
 The statute of Texas provides that there shall be no discrimi- 
 nation against any school of medicine nor apply to masseurs 
 practicing massage and provides in the defining clause that — 
 
 Any person shall be regarded as practicing medicine who shall 
 * * * treat or offer to treat any disease or disorder, mental or 
 physical deformity, or injury by any system or method or to effect cures 
 thereof and charge therefor, directly or indirectly, money or other com- 
 pensation. 
 
 This is another of the statutes which makes the right to prac- 
 tice Christian Science depend upon the charging of a compensa- 
 tion. 
 
 The State of Utah has this provision in the exempting clause : 
 This act docs not prohibit * * * those healing by spiritual means 
 without pretending to have a knowledge of medicine. 
 
 In Vermont there is no exemption, and the act is made by the 
 defining clause to apply to all persons who — ■ 
 
 prescribe, direct, recommend, or advise, give or sell for the use of any 
 person any drug, medicine, or other agency or application for the treat- 
 ment, cure, or relief of any bodily injury, infirmity, or disease, or who 
 fellows the occupation of treating disease by any system or method. 
 
 The defining clause in the statute of Virginia makes the stat- 
 ute apply to persons who — 
 
 cure or relieve those suffering from injury or deformity, or disease of 
 mind or body, or advertise or announce to the public in any manner a 
 readiness or ability to heal, cure, or relieve those who may be suffering 
 from injury or deformity or disease of mind or body. 
 
 The exemption clause is as follows: 
 
 Nothing in this act shall be construed to affect or to limit the prac- 
 tice of the religious tenents of any church in the ministration of the 
 sick or suffering by mental or spiritual means without the use of any 
 drug or material remedy, whether gratuitously or for compensation, 
 provided sanitary laws are complied with. 
 41917 — 10000 
 
17 
 
 The exemption clause in the statute of Washington includes 
 the following : 
 
 Nor is the act " to discriminate against any particular school of medi- 
 cine or surgery or osteopathy, or any system or mode of treating the 
 sick or afflicted, nor to interfere in any way with the practice of re- 
 ligion." 
 
 The defining clause of the statute of West Virginia confines 
 the effect of the act to the practice of medicine, as every such 
 act should in justice be confined. 
 
 The statute of Wisconsin is in like condition. 
 
 There is no exemption in the statute of the State of Wyoming 
 and the defining clause contains the following : 
 
 Any person is regarded as practicing medicine who in any manner 
 holds himself out to the public as being engaged in the diagnosis and 
 treatment of diseases or injuries or deformities of human beings, or 
 who suggests, recommends, or prescribes any form of treatment for the 
 intended palliation, relief, or cure of any physical or mental ailment of 
 any person, with the intention of receiving therefor, either directly or 
 indirectly, any fee, gift, or compensation. 
 
 Another of the statutes turning upon the question of charging 
 for services rendered. 
 
 The statutes containing these various peculiar provisions, 
 especially those bringing within the terms of the statutes for 
 the regulation of the practice of medicine and surgery all per- 
 sons who are healing disease by altogether different means and 
 without the use of medicines or surgery, show the extent to 
 which the American Medical Association has gone in attempting 
 to hold in the hands of its own profession and school of medi- 
 cine the treatment of disease, and how obliging the legislatures 
 of the different States have been in giving false definitions of 
 the practice of medicine and surgery in aid of this effort on 
 their part. If these unjust and, in many cases, unconstitutional 
 statutes should be enforced Christian Scientists would be in 
 many of the States absolutely prohibited from any attempt to 
 heal disease or alleviate suffering in any form ; but, fortunately, 
 the people of this country are more enlightened, intelligent, and 
 tolerant than the doctors or their legislators in many cases. 
 The doctors have made the most strenuous efforts to enforce 
 these statutes in various States. Their efforts have usually 
 been failures. Generally jurors will not convict in such cases, 
 even if the statute has been violated, as the beneficent work of 
 Christian Science has become so well known throughout the 
 country, resulting in the healing of thousands of people after 
 the doctors had given them up as incurable, and has convinced 
 pretty much everybody except the doctors, whose selfish interests 
 are involved, that they are doing a work which should be com- 
 mended by all good citizens instead of making it a criminal 
 offense to exercise their right of healing. 
 
 I am going to trouble the Senate now for a time by showing 
 just what has been done in some cases by the medical practi- 
 tioners in attempting to enforce these prohibitory statutes 
 which they themselves have brought about for selfish purposes 
 in the prosecution, even persecution, of those who have con- 
 scientiously endeavored to heal disease and alleviate suffering 
 by means in which they thoroughly believe and which have 
 been eminently successful. 
 
 I can give only a very few of these cases, as time will not 
 
 permit me to go into many of them. If I could bring before 
 
 the Senate of the United States all of the cases of persecution 
 
 that have grown up under the prohibitive statutes which I have 
 
 41917—10969 2 
 
18 
 
 called to its attention it would arouse the just indignation of 
 every Member of tbis body. 
 
 I now call attention to one ease wbicb is in point. I bave 
 called to tbe attention of tbe Senate the provisions in tbe stat- 
 ute of tbe State of Missouri wbicb makes it a penal offense for 
 any person to attempt to treat tbe sick or tbose afflicted witb 
 bodily or mental infirmities unless tbey bave procured a license 
 to practice medicine or surgery from tbe board of bealtb, au- 
 tborized by tbe statute to issue sucb licenses. Of course, 
 Christian Scientists can not procure a license from a medical 
 board of examiners or board of bealtb, because tbey are neither 
 medical practitioners nor surgeons. Therefore, under tbis stat- 
 ute, every person wbo ministers to tbe sick or injured without 
 such a license is made subject to a penalty. 
 
 Bertha Beichenbecher was a Christian Science practitioner 
 and a reader in one of the churches in the city of St. Lonis. 
 She was urgently requested to attend a man wbo falsely 
 claimed to be seriously ill. She responded to the call and ac- 
 cepted a fee of §1 that was pressed upon her by the alleged 
 patient. The man was a decoy of the health department of the 
 city, who pretended to be ill in order to detect Miss Eeicben- 
 becber in tbe act of practicing Christian Science healing. The 
 bill be gave her was marked. Officers were waiting for her at 
 the door and arrested her for the alleged offense and took her 
 to the police station and treated her throughout witb unneces- 
 sary indignities. But I shall let Miss Eeicbenbecber give tbe 
 particulars of tbe occurrence. She has made a succinct state- 
 ment of the whole matter in a sworn affidavit, which is as 
 follows : 
 
 State op Missoct.t, City of St. Louis, ss: 
 
 Personally appeared before the undersigned, a notary public within 
 and for the said city of St. Louis, Bertha Beichenbecher, who, being 
 duly sworn on oath, deposes and says, viz : 
 
 '• My name is Bertha Eeichenbecher ; am 45 years of age, and nn- 
 married. I reside at No. 1726 Oregon Avenue in the said city of St. 
 Louis, where I keep house with my mother, who is now 81 years of 
 age. I have been a member of local Christian Science churches for 
 the past 12 years. I am now a member and the second reader of 
 Third Church of Christ, Scientist, In St. Louis, and have been a mem- 
 ber of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, of Boston, Mass.. since 
 1907 ; am also a Christian Science practitioner, and have been for two 
 years past. 
 
 " On Friday, December 15, 1911, a young woman, giving her name as 
 Hazel Miller, applied to me at my home for Christian Science treat- 
 ment, saying that she had obtained my name from another Christian 
 Scientist and that she has also heard me read in the Christian Science 
 Church. I gave her a treatment, and she requested me to call the 
 next morning to see her brother, who, she said, was confined to the 
 house with Bright's disease. She gave her residence as No. 2118 
 Oregon Avenue. There was nothing said by either of us about payment 
 for the treatment. The next morning at 11.15 I called at that ad- 
 dress and found the young man lying on a couch, covered, and with a 
 bottle of medicine and a pipe on a chair beside him. After a short 
 talk I gave him treatment and arranged that he should call at my home 
 the following Monday, as he had arranged for a week's treatment. I 
 had started for the door when he called me back and insisted that his 
 ' sister ' pay me for the treatment. I asked them to wait until I was 
 through with the case, but he insisted that I accept payment then for 
 the treatment given. They paid me $1, and I departed. Upon reaching 
 the corner of Oregon and Russell Avenue, a man stood facing me, who 
 bowed as I approached, and said, 'You are Miss Eeichenbecher?' I re- 
 plied, ' Yes,' and shook hands with him, thinking he was some one I 
 had met and whose name I could not recall. He said, ' My name is 
 Coats : I am an officer of the law, and must arrest you for practicing 
 Christian Science without a license.' I asked if he had been watching 
 my house. He replied, ' We do not give away our methods.' I then 
 41917—10969 
 
19 
 
 said that I could not understand why they should entrap me in this 
 way, when they might go and find Christian Science practitioners in 
 their offices all over the city. He made no reply. I asked permission 
 to go to my home, a little over a block away, and inform my mother, 
 who is 91 years old, that I would he away for a little while ; hut he 
 would not permit me, saying that I could use both telephones when I 
 reached the station. YVe then took the Tower Grove car to the central 
 station, and he reported to Acting Sergt. Singleton. I telephoned to 
 Mr. John Asheroft that I had been placed under arrest. It was 12.30, 
 as near as I can remember, when we arrived at the station. I told 
 them that my bondsman and attorney would be there as quickly as 
 possible. After giving my name, etc., Officer Coats, who arrested' me, 
 escorted me to the second floor and I was turned over to the matron. 
 There was some woman present who had slept there several nights, 
 having been under arrest, to whom the matron said in sharp, impatient 
 tone, as I entered, ' Turn your back.' She then said to me in the same 
 tone, 'Take off your things.' I said, 'Why? Shall I have to wait 
 long? I am waiting for my bondsman and attorney.' She said. 'You 
 will probably be here some little time.' She then said., 'Take off your 
 hat.' When I did so, she took it and untied the lining ; felt all over the 
 hat, inside and out : and requested me to take off my coat. She emptied 
 my pockets, and asked whether there were only two pockets in the coat, 
 after shaking the same. She then said, 'Put down your bag; now take 
 off your waist.' I said, ' Why, do you mean to search me ? ' She replied, 
 ' Yes.' I grew red, I know, and said, ' Why, I am not arrested for 
 theft; do you know what I am arrested for?' She said, 'Yes; we have 
 had lots of your kind, and we have to take these measures to get rid 
 of them.' I remarked, ' I have been arrested for practicing Christian 
 Science without a license.' She said, ' I know — drop your skirts.' 1 
 stood but 3 or 4 feet from a door which contained a glass panel, across 
 which a narrow towel had been stretched, leaving some inches of the 
 glass exposed at the top. I turned, and said, ' Why, look ; I can see 
 those men's heads.' She said, ' That don't matter ; they can't see any- 
 thing.' I reiterated at different times, ' This is awful, 'to be compelled 
 to be searched as though I had committed a theft ' ; and I remarked 
 that Miss Dyer had been arrested several weeks before, and I asked 
 whether she had been subjected to this ordeal. She said she did not 
 remember ; she supposed so. She requested me to unfasten my garters 
 and remove my corsets, which article she carefully searched, and she 
 then told me to take off my shoes and turn down my stockings to the 
 feet. This left me with nothing but my undergarments on, and she 
 felt carefully over my entire body and also through my hair. While 
 she searched I could also hear the voice of Mr. Priesmeyer, my bonds- 
 man, talking in the nest room. 
 
 " During our conversation I asked the matron if she knew anything 
 about Christian Science, and she said very little ; that one lady at one 
 time gave her a rather intelligent answer to the question as 'to what 
 Christian Science was ; and she asked me what Christian Science was. 
 I said, ' Prayer, and keeping the heart close to God.' 
 
 "After dressing, she asked me to count out the money in my purse, 
 laying dollars together, and to turn out everything that was in it. 
 There was $12.86 in the purse. My bag or purse was then handed to 
 the two men In the nest room (Coats and Lawrence), and, as the door 
 was opened a number of times while I was in there, I saw them count- 
 ing the money and going through the contents of my bag. These men 
 put my money in an envelope and marked it ' 11.86.' I did not know 
 until I saw the statement in the newspaper two days later that they 
 had taken the marked dollar bill, which Lawrence had given me, out 
 of my purse, nor did I know that the dollar was marked. 
 
 " While the matron did not handle me roughly, she treated me in 
 exactly the same manner she would have exercised with any criminal 
 who was turned over to her. While I did not resist physically, I cer- 
 tainly made strong protests against being subjected to 'the search. I 
 treated her with the courtesy with which I treat everyone, and when 
 I left I said ' good-day ' to her, as I did not blame her for the treat- 
 ment I had received, since she assured me she was only carrying out 
 orders. 
 
 " Later, when I was permitted to go into the next room, there was 
 another man who required me to sign my name in a book, and he 
 escorted me to the room downstairs where my bag had been left, and 
 there it was turned over to me. 
 
 " Bertha Reichexbecher." 
 
 Subscribed and sworn to before me this 15th day of January, 3 912. 
 My commission expires May 30, 1914. 
 
 [seal.] Oliver Frazier, 
 
 Rotary Puhlic, City of St. Louis, Mo. 
 41917—10909 
 
20 
 
 This disgraceful proceeding aroused the indignation of the 
 good people of St. Louis. The prosecuting attorney denounced 
 the proceeding as a " frame-up " and refused to prosecute the 
 casa The newspapers, including some medical journals, de- 
 nounced the proceedings in unmeasured terms. One of the 
 newspapers of the city, after giving a full account of the affair 
 and commenting severely upon the conduct of the board of 
 health, had this further to say : 
 
 PHYSICIAN DENOUNCES COMMISSIONER. 
 
 The next step In protest against municipal and medical tyranny was 
 taken a few days later when Dr. Paul Fletcher, a member of the city 
 council and a prominent doctor, introduced resolutions In the couucil 
 condemning the action of Dr. Starkloff in gathering evidence. The 
 council defeated the resolutions. Dr. Fletcher defined his position as 
 follows : 
 
 " The health commissioner has caused employees to faint, and the 
 methods are repugnant to many of our esteemed citizens ; it is a travesty 
 on the law and subversive of right and justice. It is wrong to put a 
 woman in jail who has committed no crime. I am a physician, but if 
 our law officers are compelled to resort to such methods it is time to rise 
 op in protest 
 
 The opposition of medical journals to Christian Science was 
 clearly shown, but it is some consolation that some of them de- 
 nounced this proceeding and declared for common decency in 
 the treatment of such cases. I wish this might be said of the 
 doctors who usually deal with matters of this kind. They are 
 trying to enforce such prohibitory laws rigorously and without 
 mercy with the hope of suppressing such treatment of disease 
 entirely. It is a hopeless task as well as a brutal attempt to 
 deprive thousands of our people of the right to resort to the 
 remedy of their own choice for relief from disease. If the 
 teachings of Christian Science are false, if the principle of heal- 
 ing its people believe in is not true and their pretensions a fake, 
 Christian Science will not survive. If it is the truth it will 
 prevail, and no restrictive or prohibitory laws nor any amount 
 of persecution can overthrow it or force them to forego their 
 right and their religious duty to heal the sick. They believe, 
 and I concur in that belief, that any law that forbids or inter- 
 feres with this right and duty is in violation of the Constitution 
 of the United States and should be treated accordingly. I shall 
 come to this question further along. 
 
 I desire to take up one or two other cases of prosecution un- 
 der the prohibitory or restrictive State statutes. The following 
 newspaper account of conditions in Xew York is interesting : 
 
 AEEEST3 IN NEW TOEK CASE AGAINST MES. MOSBACH RESULTS IN AC- 
 QUITTAL GEAND JUEY EEFUSES TO INDICT ONE MAN. 
 
 The status of the "irregular" practitioner in New York City is still 
 an unknown quantity. Tbe latest case that has come up is that of 
 Mrs. Margaret Mosbach, whose daughter, Kathryn, was found by the 
 coroner to have died on November 30, 1911, of diphtheria, under treat- 
 ment by a Christian Science practitioner, Mrs. Marie Roberts, of the 
 Bronx. On January 5 a coroner's jury, containing many of the most 
 prominent men of the Bronx, acquitted Mrs. Mosbach of willful neglect 
 in failing to call a physician for her daughter. The verdict of the 
 jury raised the question of needed legislation to prevent occurrence of 
 euc'b cases. 
 
 WHY NOT AEEEST DOCTORS, TOO? 
 
 Mr. Virgil O. Strickler, former first reader of the First Church of 
 Christ, Scientist, New York, commented on the Mosbach case in a 
 lecture. Mr. Strickler said that the New York World had published 
 a list of 32 children who had died under Christian Science treatment 
 during the last 13 years. The newspapers always publish such cases in 
 glaring headlines, he said, but the people's attention was not called to 
 ' 41917— 109G9 
 
21 
 
 oases proving fatal under regular physicians. Against 1,715 deaths in 
 New York alone from diphtheria during 1010 of young children under 
 care of doctors, only 10 from that cause had occurred in 13 years under 
 Christian Science treatment over the entire Nation. " Reaily," he con- 
 cluded, " in all fairness, why should not the doctors he arrested for 
 allowing these children to die under their treatment, the same as a 
 Christian Science practitioner is arrested when one patient dies from 
 the same disease under her treatment?" 
 
 GRAND JURY REFUSES INDICTMENT. 
 
 This recent case recalls the arrest about a year ago of Willis V. Cole, 
 Byron W. Winslow, and Julius Benjamin, Christian Scientists, after the 
 machinations of a woman detective who feigned illness and asked them 
 for treatment. They were held for the court of special sessions, hut 
 had the trials transferred to the court of general sessions. This gave 
 the grand jury an opportunity to pass upon the merits of the cases, 
 and the grand jury investigating Mr. Winslow's case refused to indict. 
 The cases of Cole and Benjamin are still pending, and will probably 
 be made test cases to decide the rights of unlicensed practitioners. 
 
 Mrs. Mosbacli was charged with neglect in trusting to Chris- 
 tian. Science treatment in case of her daughter who died of 
 diphtheria and not calling a doctor. It is quite a common thing 
 to censure anyone who fails to call a doctor where death ensues. 
 If a doctor is called and the patient dies no one is to blame. If 
 a doctor loses a patient it is called a misfortune. The same 
 thing if a Christian Scientist is the attendant is a crime. 
 
 This further account of the New York situation is from the 
 New York World : 
 
 WHY NOT ARREST DOCTORS WHEN PATIENTS DIE? (VIRGIL O. STICKLER) 
 
 THERE WERE 1,715 DIPHTHERIA DEATHS IN CITY IN 1910 UNDER 
 
 " SCIENCE " TREATMENT 1 IN 13 YEARS FIRST READER QUOTES FROM 
 
 VITAL STATISTICS PROTESTS AGAINST ADVOCATES OF THE DRUGGING 
 
 SYSTEM ATTEMPTING TO DICTATE. 
 
 When the World published two weeks ago a list of 32 children who 
 had died of diphtheria and other diseases during the last 13 years 
 while being treated by Christian Science practitioners it moved Virgil O. 
 Strickler, the first reader of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, 
 Ninety-sixth Street and Central Park West, to compile a few statistics 
 from the vital records of the city to set against the list. This is his 
 response as he made it when lecturing to the Sixth Church of Christ, 
 Scientist, in Lexington Hall, No. 158 Bast Fifty-eighth Street, Tuesday 
 night. 
 
 Many people do not understand why Christian Scientists have more 
 faith in Christian Science treatment than they have in drugs. The rea- 
 son is very plain, said Mr. Strickler. They get better results under 
 Christian Science than they formerly obtained under the drugging 
 system. 
 
 The World published on Sunday the names of 32 children who. it 
 claimed, had died under Christian Science treatment in the United 
 States during the past 13 years. Whenever a person, and especially a 
 child, dies under Christian Science treatment the fact is published 
 under glaring headlines in the papers, and as a rule somebody is ar- 
 rested. It is safe therefore to assume that the list published contained 
 the names of all the children who have died under Christian Science 
 treatment during the last 13 years. 
 
 In the published list of names 10 are said to have died from diph- 
 theria, 5 from pneumonia and bronchial pneumonia, 2 from scarlet 
 fever, and the remainder from a variety of causes. 
 
 WHAT NEW YORK RECORDS SHOW. 
 
 J hold in my hand an official report of the department of health of 
 the city of New York for the year 1910, which shows that during the 
 last year there were 1,715 deaths from diphtheria, nearly all children 
 under 15 under the care of doctors in this city alone, as against 10 
 deaths from the same cause under Christian Science practice in the 
 entire United States in 13 years. Of these 10 cases, only 1 was in 
 New York City. 
 
 The official report also shows that there were 053 deaths in the city 
 last year from scarlet fever under medical treatment, nearly all of 
 which were children, as against 2 in the entire United States in 13 
 years under Christian Science treatment, and not one of those was in 
 this city. 
 
 41917—10969 
 
22 
 
 The results in pneumonia and bronchial pneumonia are even more 
 startling- The official report shows that 10,519 people died in the 
 city of New York alone last year from these diseases under medical 
 treatment, more than 50 per cent of whom were children under 15 
 years of age, as against 5 per cent in the entire United States under 
 Christian Science treatment in 13 years. 
 
 The report of the board of health also shows that 2 (.111 children 
 under the age. of 15 years died from all causes under medical treatment 
 in the city of New York last year, as against 32 who are shown by the 
 published list to have died under Christian Science treatment in the 
 United States in 13 years. 
 
 WHY XOT AEEEST DOCTORS? 
 
 These facts show why Christian Science parents have more faith In 
 Christian Science than in drugs for themselves and their families. If 
 any school of medicine could guarantee cures, it would not be necessary 
 to arrest people in order to compel them to employ doctors of that 
 school. 
 
 Why do the newspapers call attention in a spectacular way to the 
 death of one child In New York City in 13 years under Christian Science 
 treatment from diphtheria, when more than 1,500 children under the 
 age of 15 years died last year in the city from the same disease under 
 medical treatment without the newspapers saying a single word about 
 the failure of the doctors? 
 
 Really, in all fairness, why should not the doctors be arrested for 
 allowing these 1,500 children to die from diphtheria under their treat- 
 ment, the same as a Christian Science practitioner is arrested when 
 one patient dies from the same disease under her treatment? Or why 
 not arrest the mothers of these 1,500 children for employing doctors 
 who allowed their children to die, the same as to arrest the mother of 
 the one child who employed a Christian Science practitioner? 
 
 Mr. President, Christian Scientists do not claim to be perfect. 
 They do not claim to heal in all cases. But they do claim that 
 they hare a much larger proportion of cures than the medical 
 practitioners, and that, too, while their patients are very largely 
 composed of persons who are afflicted with so-called incurable 
 diseases, and who have been given up as incurable by the 
 doctors. They do not believe there are any incurable diseases. 
 They have proved it by healing thousands of diseases classed as 
 incurable, and which the doctors admit they can not heal, many 
 of them being cases that the doctors have actually given up as 
 hopeless. They do not ask any favors of Congress or any 
 other lawmaking power to sustain their position as healers of 
 disease. They are willing to stand upon their merits, as shown 
 by their works. They are willing to be judged by their fruits. 
 What they do insist upon is that laws shall not be passed or 
 enforced that will deprive them of the right to heal disease or 
 put them within the power of the doctors, most of whom are 
 their common enemies, for selfish reasons. They are kept con- 
 stantly on the alert to meet the unwarranted efforts of the 
 American Medical Association to procure legislation tbat shall 
 make every act of theirs in aid of the sick aud afflicted a crime 
 and forbid them from healing disease. They have not always 
 been successful. As I have already pointed out. tbere are many 
 legislative acts in the States that have tbis effect, and which 
 are wholly unjust and oppressive. 
 
 With respect to the acts of coercion urged by the doctors, with 
 unjust laws as their weapons, the Business Farmer, published at 
 El Paso, Tex., makes editorially tbis very pertinent comment : 
 
 " WHERE ART THOU ? 
 
 "And there was war in heaven ; Michael and his angels fought against 
 the dragon." 
 
 The whole world has become a stupendous battle field, whereon is 
 being waged the grandest battle ever witnessed by mankind. The super- 
 ficial observer reads about the overthrowing of the long-established 
 monarchical Government of Portugal, the revolution in medieval China, 
 41917— 109G9 
 
23 
 
 the barbarous war between Italy and Turkey, the seething turmoil in 
 Mexico, and the strike and strivings of our country, and wonders — 
 what's next. 
 
 The close student of the times, looking beneath the surfaces, recog- 
 nizes the great universal issue at stake. He sees the battle of Arma- 
 geddon being repeated on a world-wide battle field. Fie sees all the 
 seeming powers of evil marshaled against the oncoming armies of truth. 
 He sees on one hand the believers in the universality of the brotherhood 
 of man, and on the other the cohorts of special privileges. He sees the 
 desperate efforts being made by evil and selfishness and greed to ensnare 
 and enslave man. " made in the image and likeness of God," and bind 
 him shackled and helpless to the chariot of Greed's own aggrandizement. 
 
 But universal man is slowly but surely learning of his" birthright — is 
 learning to know that he was not made to slave and toil and starve, 
 that bestial power might sit in gilded palaces and trample on every 
 right, human and divine. 
 
 One of the boldest and most audacious demands of the special-privi- 
 lege-seeking class that has been witnessed in this country is evidenced 
 in the efforts being made by the American Medical Association to foster 
 on the people of this country one of the most iniquitous laws ever at- 
 tempted to be fastened on a free people. In order to secure exclusive 
 privileges, and in flagrant violation of the rights of other schools of 
 medicine, it seeks and, to accomplish its ends, is carrying on a most 
 heartless, cruel, and diabolical campaign. It seeks to inoculate the mind 
 of the people with fear and terror. It is constantly sounding the 
 tocsin of alarm, conjuring up new diseases to frighten and terrorize the 
 community, and then demanding added powers to combat the product of 
 its own excited imagination. 
 
 The following communication to the Ohio State Journal shows 
 the oppressive measures to which the doctors have resorted iu 
 Ohio: 
 
 ARREST OF SCIENCE HEALERS. 
 
 Two years ago a timid maiden lady who happened to be practicing a 
 method of healing which required no medicine whatever was summoned 
 before the State medical board and told in language both uncivil and 
 severe : if not harsh and cruel, that if it ever heard of her healing any- 
 one by her method it would arrest her, and the frightened girl has 
 obeyed. Remember this threat was against the practice of medicine 
 without license, which she had never thought of doing and knew not 
 how to do. 
 
 Permit me to cite another outrage from the same official quarter : 
 Late Friday night two officers appeared at two residences on the East 
 Side and, compelling two ladies to enter a patrol wagon, hurried them 
 off to the West Side on a charge of trying to heal the sick without 
 medicine and without the paid consent of the medical board. The evi- 
 dent design and hope of the planners of this late-at-night arrest was 
 to terrify and mortify the lone ladies, who had for months kept a 
 cancer-afflicted patient from the surgeon's knife and thus cheated hirn 
 out of a case, if not a fee. As it was, the ladies had to wait at the 
 station until husband, friend, and attorney came to release them under 
 bond, thus defeating the design to punish the ladies by a night in jail. 
 
 Now, the ends of the law, if merciful, could have been met in broad 
 daylight, between 9 a. m. and 5 p. m., but that would not have served 
 the aim. Even if the medical board is a legal department of State, 
 some of its officers are not commending it to public favor, but, rather, 
 inviting comparison with the monarchical methods of Europe, China, 
 and Japan. (Reform, Columbus, Nov. 25.) 
 
 WHY THE AMERICAN' MEDICAL ASSOCIATION WANTS THIS BILL PASSED. 
 
 The American Medical Association is using every effort to 
 maintain aud increase its power. To this end it has spent years 
 of time and thousands of dollars in the effort to establish a 
 national medicine with one of their schools of medicine at its 
 head. The Senate can readily see by what I have already 
 shown of their efforts to enforce the existing laws how that 
 power would be used against every other school and mode of 
 healing. They have organized for the campaign in the most 
 effective way. The association passed the following resolution, 
 offered by Dr. McCormack : 
 
 Resolved, That the president be. and is hereby, authorized to appoint 
 a committee of seven members, which shall be charged with the duty of 
 41917—10000 
 
24 
 
 framing a bill for a national department of health, to be presented to 
 the next session of Congress in December, and that this committee shall 
 consider and determine all matters and policies relating to national 
 health legislation, and may invite the cooperation and cooperate with 
 other organizations having the same purpose in view. 
 
 Prof. Irving Fisher, chairman of the committee of one hun- 
 dred, largely composed of allopathic or " regular " doctors, has 
 this to say on the subject : 
 
 Our legislative subcommittee and executive subcommittee have held 
 frequent meetings. We believe that it is not possible to overcome the 
 opposition unless a campaign fund of from $20,000 to $25,000 can be 
 raised at once. This will be used for printing, stationery, telegrams, 
 etc., the effect of which will be that Congressmen, especially pivotal 
 Congressmen, will net dare to displease their constituents by opposing 
 President Taft's program. It will also be used to reach our American 
 Health League — which contains many thousand health enthusiasts — to 
 start up our Authors' League of 1,00*0 health writers, to stimulate our 
 press council of 100 leading editors, and to supply them and the mem- 
 bers generally with ammunition in the way of literature ; also to reach 
 the labor organizations and the Grange and ail our allies. » * * 
 
 I am writing to you among the first, knowing that you keenly ap- 
 preciate the Importance of overcoming the selfish opposition to a proj- 
 ect which, once started, will surely expand within a decade so that mil- 
 lions upon millions of Government money will be put into this most 
 needed form of national defense. 
 
 Letters received from Congressmen in response to our effort to poll 
 them on this question show that many of them, and especially those 
 who control procedure, need something more than the President's mes- 
 sage to urge them to action ; In short, that they must nave letters and 
 telegrams from their constituents. 
 
 Mr. GALLINGER, Mr. President 
 
 The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Towhsekd in the chair). 
 Does the Senator from California yield to the Senator from 
 New Hampshire? 
 
 Mr. WORKS. Certainly. 
 
 Mr. GALLINGER, I presume the Senator from California 
 Is aware of the fact — but I think it ought to go into the Rec- 
 ord — that Prof. Fisher is not a physician. 
 
 Mr. WORKS. Oh, yes ; I am aware of that. 
 
 Mr. GALLINGER. He is merely a professor of economics, 
 or something of that kind. He took up this propaganda — I do 
 not know what his purpose was — and has undertaken to push 
 it over the country. I never approved of it, and told him so 
 very plainly. 
 
 Mr. WORKS. I had stated on another occasion, I will say 
 to the Senator from New Hampshire, that I regard the efforts 
 of Prof. Fisher as entirely sincere. 
 
 Mr. GALLINGER. Undoubtedly. 
 
 Mr. WORKS. But he is not a pbysician. 
 
 The reference to President Taft's program in this communica- 
 tion was purely gratuitous. The President had no such program 
 as they were attempting to carry out. On the contrary, he was 
 opposed to the bill and so informed its friends. He was op- 
 posed to creating a medical department and they were so in- 
 formed. What he did recommend was the bringing together of 
 the present medical bureaus under one management, giving as 
 a reason that it would be more economical as well as more effi- 
 cient, and nothing more. They are accepting this bill in its 
 present form because they must, but with the fixed purpose of 
 adding to it when they can until they have gotten all they 
 Started out to get. 
 
 Now, Mr. President, let us see what they are seeking to accom- 
 plish. There is no limit to their ambition and selfish desires in 
 this respect, as I shall show by their own declarations. 
 41017—10: 69 
 
25 
 
 The following resolution of the American Medical Association, 
 adopted by its committee on medical legislation during its ses- 
 sion at the Holland House, in Xew York City, in June, 1903, will 
 tend to show the extent to which they are willing to go and the 
 means they will use to accomplish results : 
 
 Resolved (4). It shall be the duty of each member of the national 
 auxiliary congressional and legislative committee to bring all and only 
 such matters of pending legislation as may be referred to him, either 
 by the legislative committee of his respective State or Territorial 
 medical association, or by the committee on medical legislation of the 
 American Medical Association, to the attention of the medical profes- 
 sion and the people of his respective county, and by every honorable 
 means, personal and political, individual and professional, private and 
 public, direct and indirect, secure desired action thereon by his repre- 
 sentatives In both blanches, as the case may be, of the State legislature, 
 or of the Congress of the United States. And it shall be his further 
 duty promptly to report all such efforts on his part, first, relative to 
 State legislation, to the chairman of the committee on legislation of 
 his State medical association ; and, secondly, relative to national legis- 
 lation, to the chairman of the committee on medical legislation of the 
 American Medical Association. 
 
 Resolved, That the chairman of committee on medical legislation of 
 the American Medical Association is hereby directed (a) to procure 
 from the president of each State and Territorial medical association 
 nominations for such national auxiliary congressional and legislative 
 committee, (b) to formulate a list of the chief executive and legislative 
 officers of the United States Government and of the government of each 
 State and Territory, (c) to collate necessary information relative to 
 the executive and legislative departments of the American Medical 
 Association and of each State and Territorial medical association, (d) 
 to formulate a list of the officers of each State and Territorial board 
 of health and medical licensing board, and (e) to secure a brief sum- 
 mary of proposed legislation, State and national. And be is further 
 directed to arrange the information thus collected into a congressional 
 and legislative directory of the American Medical Association. 
 
 Dr. Samuel Dixon, of Pennsylvania, in a paper entitled " Law 
 the Foundation of State Medicine," published in the journal of 
 the association, said : 
 
 Compulsion, not persuasion, la the keynote of State medicine. Let it 
 be understood that no matter how great efforts we may make to 
 educate the people, unless we have the lex scripta — the written law — ■ 
 to fall back on, State medicine, while it may be a beautiful science, can 
 never be a practical art. * * * The great majority of mankind 
 are neither wise enough voluntarily to submit themselves to the require- 
 ments of sanitary law for the sake of preserving their own health and 
 that of their loved ones, or righteous enough to be willing to exercise 
 self-denial and repress the cravings of avarice to save others from 
 sickness, suffering, and death. * * * But the law we must have. 
 These laws must reach into all the relations of life. * * * 
 
 Thus we have a State system of sanitary administration, complete 
 and symmetrical ; its head at the seat of power in the State, untram- 
 meled in the exercise of authority, reaching down through the subdivi- 
 sions of county and township to the people, and a department in daily 
 touch with every nook and corner of the State through its faithful 
 allies, the physicians of the Commonwealth. 
 
 The following from an article by Henry It. Strong, of St 
 Louis, shows fairly well the workings of the American Medical 
 Association : 
 
 TIIE ATTEMPT OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION TO ■ENLIST LEGIS- 
 LATIVE AID IN FAVOR OF ITS MONOPOLISTIC SCHEMES. 
 
 Finally, in the last few years, the association, following the example 
 of other corporations in the gradual forging of its monopolistic bonds, 
 has essayed to influence the legislative and administrative branches of 
 State and National Government in favor of its schemes, and has re- 
 cently gone openly into politics for that purpose. To be sure, it still 
 shouts its old-time slogan of " the public weal," but in this case it 
 makes the thinnest kind of disguise of its real motives and openly 
 boasts that it has already made the power of medicine felt in legisla- 
 tive halls, so that whereas legislators formerly kept the representatives 
 of the association dancing attendance upon them for anything they 
 41017—10969 
 
26 
 
 wanted now these same legislators dance attendance upon the associa- 
 tion's delegates 
 
 Said Dr. C. A. L. Reed, chairman of the legislative committee and 
 late candidate for the United States Senate, in a speech at Chicago 
 during the recent meeting of the association : 
 
 " When a committee of the American Medical Association went to 
 the Fifty-eighth Congress, their legislative committee said, ' Can't you 
 boil down what you have to say into 20 minutes?' Dr. Reed said, 
 * There were in that Congress one doctor in the Senate and none in the 
 House.' * * * 
 
 " In the Sixtieth Congress there were five doctors, all told, and he- 
 cause of the same influence we simply went to the Willard Hotel and 
 sent for Congressmen to come to us, and they came. * * * In 
 the next Congress I have every reason to helieve there will be 25 
 physicians." 
 
 According to Dr. Reed, it is only by representation in Congress, 
 which he described as being at present ' water-logged with lawyers,' 
 that the association could hope to see its will translated into law. * 
 ******* 
 
 Like every powerful corporation, the American Medical Association 
 has a legislative fund. Probably like every other corporation it har, 
 really two legislative fur.ds. one open to public scrutiny and the other 
 knowu only to the powers that be. The Journal of the American Med- 
 ical Association of May 2o, 190S, tells of annual expenses for " med- 
 ical legislation" (whatever that may mean) of $2,573.22. It can hardly 
 be. however, that this represents all the money spent in furthering its 
 legislative and political schemes, for the committee on legislation, of 
 which Dr. C. A. L. Reed was chairman, in its report to the convention 
 in 1905 stated : 
 
 " It has secured a list of local political leaders of every organized 
 and recognized political party in the United States. The list already 
 embraces the names of several political managers in each of 900 coun- 
 ties, the entire list aggregating in excess of 11,000 names. Through 
 this list the central committee is in position to bring questions of pend- 
 ing legislation to the serious and thoughtful consideration of the men 
 who, in their respective localities, exercise a preponderating influence 
 in determining political action. * * * T ue political list is arranged 
 so that the dominant politics of each county and of each congressional 
 district is indicated, as well as the political affiliations of each member 
 whose name appears on the list. It thus happens that we are able to 
 move with a certain degree of accuracy in invoking political influence 
 in behalf of such measures as are taken up by your committee. This 
 list will be kept alive by asking for revisions from time to time, espe- 
 cially after each general election, and will, we are sure, prove to be an 
 effective medium of action in the agitations which are pending in the 
 immediate future." 
 
 In June. 1907, it was announced by Dr. Reed that the association 
 had an emissary in each of the 2.S30 counties of the country, and that 
 the list of political leaders had been increased to 16.000. to whom cir- 
 culars are sent, the purpose being, according to Dr. Reed, " to educate 
 them on proposed or pending legislation in which the medical profes- 
 sion is interested." All of which shows that the American Medical 
 Association leaders have not been idle and that they are not novices in 
 politics. 
 
 If this kind of work is being kept up, it must certainly require more 
 than the paltry sum specified in the Journal's report to sustain it. 
 
 Mr. President, the doctors in all their efforts to procure re- 
 strictive or prohibitive legislation of this kind, proceed upon the 
 theory that they and they alone are competent to deal with 
 questions of health, and that all other people claiming to heal 
 disease are incompetents. Thus it is said by Dr. Henry O. 
 Marey, former president of the American Medical Association, 
 in speaking of the opposition to this bill : 
 
 It is the old cry of the incompetents who practice under various 
 designations against legislation that will tend to bar them from prac- 
 tice and keep the practice in the hands of those who will not be a 
 menace to the public health. 
 
 This is a very significant utterance. It assumes that all 
 
 knowledge in health preservation and healing is in the old 
 
 school practitioners, and that the purpose of this legislation is 
 
 intended to bar everyone else. Here is another declaration of 
 
 41917— 109G9 
 
2T 
 
 a like kind. Dr. C. A. L. Reed, chairman of the legislative com- 
 mittee of the American Medical Association, has this to say : 
 
 The principle that is involved is the same — that the man in posses- 
 sion of the technical knowledge which gives him a scientific compre- 
 hension of his subject and his problem should have the executive au- 
 thority to enforce that knowledge and not be overridden by a man who 
 has no such technical knowledge, and consequently no such compre- 
 hension of the importance of the subject. 
 
 And Prof. J. Pease Norton, of Yale University, in a speech 
 before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 
 reprinted with approval in the journal of the American Medical 
 Association, pointed out the extent to which the advocates of 
 this kind of legislation proposed to go if Congress should permit 
 it. He says : 
 
 1. It seems desirable that a United States national department of 
 health should be established, having as its head a secretary, who shall 
 be a member of the Executive Cabinet. 
 
 2. The purpose of the department should be to take all measures cal- 
 culated, in the judgment of experts, to decrease deaths, to decrease 
 sickness, and to increase physical and mental efficiency of citizens. 
 
 3. It should consist of the following bureaus : 
 National bureau of infant bygiene. 
 National bureau of education and schools. 
 National bureau of sanitation. 
 
 National bureau of pure food. 
 
 National bureau of registration of physicians and surgeons. 
 
 National bureau of registration of drugs, druggists, and drug manu- 
 facturers. 
 
 National bureau of registration of Institutions of public and private 
 relief, correction, detention, and residence. 
 
 National bureau of organic diseases. 
 
 National bureau of quarantine. 
 
 National bureau of health information. 
 
 National bureau of immigration. 
 
 National bureau of labor conditions. 
 
 National bureau of research, requiring statistics. 
 
 National bureau of research, requiring laboratories and equipment. 
 
 This is a pretty broad field that the National Government is 
 expected to enter upon. It is almost without limit. 
 
 And when a measure similar to this was before Congress on a 
 hearing before a Senate committee, Dr. Welch, formerly presi- 
 dent of the same association, threw out this significant remark 
 to the Senator from Utah [Mr. Shoot] : 
 
 I would simply like to throw out the suggestion that it may be that 
 the Federal Government can exercise larger powers in this matter than 
 is generally supposed to be the case. 
 
 These declarations show authoritatively and clearly what 
 these gentlemen have in view as the final result of legislation 
 of this character and the use they expect to make of it. It is 
 an imposing and far-reaching scheme to bring the entire health 
 activities under the control of this one school of medicine and 
 by the power thus given them to influence and control indirectly, 
 if not directly, the health activities of the several States. But 
 one of the most radical declarations upon this important subject 
 will be found in the magazine, Clinical Medicine, in the issue of 
 April, 1911, as follows : 
 
 The inhabitants of each community should be equally divided among 
 the physicians, and these shouid have no expectation of poaching on their 
 neighbors' preserves. If any increase in pay resulted from such acts 
 they would soon cease. The proportion would be more equally approxi- 
 mated, and every member of the profession would have enough. 
 
 It is a grave menace to the liberties of the people in a matter 
 of life and death. I wonder how far the Congress of the United 
 Slates is willing to be made a party to such a scheme. 
 41017— 109G9 
 
28 
 
 Mr. President, I have shown by the declaration of eminent 
 physicians, either now or heretofore connected with the Amer- 
 ican Medical Association, what their purposes and intentions are 
 in seeking this legislation, and what the people of this country 
 may expect if the powers of the Government are thus given over 
 to them. I want now to call the attention of the Senate to what 
 some other equally distinguished gentlemen have said as to the 
 purpose and effect of legislation of this kind. In an address de- 
 livered by Dr. G. Frank Lydston, of the medical department of 
 the State University of Illinois, in speaking of the efforts of 
 the doctors to procure such legislation as I have been calling 
 attention to, he says : 
 
 Despotism in medicine is not a theory, it is a condition, one that 
 should alarm all save its direct beneficiaries. No physician can. with 
 equanimity, survey the trend of affairs medical in America unless he 
 has no interest in personal liberty. He has forgotten the high ideals 
 of our medical forefathers. The more speciously masked self-interest is 
 the more dangerous it becomes. 
 
 And this extract from the Pacific Coast Journal of Homeop- 
 athy : 
 
 No citizen objects to Government supervision looking to sanitation, 
 pure water, air, and food but what he finds next is in the invasion 
 of the right and duty of a family physician and of his own personal 
 liberty by health-board doctors. In short, he objects to health boards. 
 He also objects to doctors, and if in private practice he would not call 
 in one to invade his home, dictating medication to him, and imprison- 
 ing him if he refuses to submit. They say the national department 
 would not do this. Well, the city and State departments are supposed 
 not to do it, but they do it with an iron hand. The citizens do not 
 want political doctors bossing therapeutics. 
 
 I call attention also to a word said by Herbert Spencer on 
 this subject that is interesting and instructive : 
 
 Moved as are the projectors of a railway, who, whilst secretly hoping 
 for salaries, persuade themselves and others that the proposed railway 
 will be beneficial to the public — moved, as all men are under such cir- 
 cumstances, by nine parts of self-interest gilt over with one part of 
 philanthropy — surgeons and physicians are vigorously striving to erect 
 a medical establishment akin to our religious one. Little do the public 
 at large know how actively professional publications are agitating for 
 State appointive overseers of the public health. There is an unmis- 
 takable wish to establish and organize a tax-supported class charged 
 with the health of men's bodies as the clergy are charged with the 
 health of their souls. And whoever has watched how institutions 
 grow, how little by little a very innocent-looking infancy unfolds into 
 a formidable maturity, with vested interests, political influence, and a 
 strong instinct of self-preservation, will see that the germs here 
 peeping forth are quite capable under favorable circumstances of de- 
 veloping into such an organization. 
 
 These are only samples of numerous declarations on this 
 subject. Others might be cited, but time will not permit. The 
 ones given are amply sufficient to show what is ahead of us in 
 the strenuous and remarkable effort of an interested class to 
 procure legislation that will immeasurably increase their power 
 at the expense of the liberty of the whole people. 
 
 Mr. President, it is not only what they want that should lead 
 us to consider their demands with the greatest caution. The 
 means by which they propose to procure what they want is 
 more reprehensible, and should condemn their whole effort as 
 unreasonable, unjust, and tyrannical. They propose to enter 
 into politics in its worst and most disgraceful form to force 
 from Congress and State legislatures the laws they want. 
 This is clearly shown by their oven declarations and official 
 acts. They show some'hing more than this. It appears from 
 41917— 100G9 
 
29 
 
 Hie declarations to which I am about to call attention that 
 their claim that they are working unselfishly and in the interest 
 of humanity is a mere pretense. They are working in the 
 interest of themselves and no one else. Let me call the atten- 
 tion of the Senate to a few of the many expressions of this 
 kind, showing conclusively the selfish motive behind this move- 
 ment. The South Carolina Medical Journal states : 
 
 We all know (or ought to know if we are old enough to practice 
 medicine) that legislation is not accomplished in the effulgent sun- 
 light of a noisy public, not on the hustings of a demagogic campaign 
 meeting, nor even (where one might suppose) on the oratorical forum 
 of the House of Representatives. 
 
 It is conceived, laid, and hatched in political byways and hedges ; 
 around the corner on the dead quiet, with soft words and apt reason- 
 ing. 
 
 The president of the North Dakota State Medical Association, 
 addressing the association, says: 
 
 We are better equipped to pass sane and important legislation than 
 any other body of men and to make ourselves felt in public matters, 
 owing to our intimate relations, as family physicians and. advisers, 
 with the voters throughout the State. 
 
 Dr. Cornelius Williams, president of the Minnesota State 
 Medical Association, in his presidential address at the forty- 
 first annual meeting, October, 1909, as reported in the Journal 
 of the American Medical Association November 20, 1909, said: 
 
 I declare that it is only by a participation in politics that the 
 physician may accomplish his whole mission, and that such partici- 
 pation is one of his highest duties. From the very nature of his 
 position his duties place him in the rSle of police ; he must suppress 
 or regulate whatever is injurious to the peace, health, morality, gen- 
 eral intelligence, and thrift of the community and its internal safety. 
 Isolated in the sense that there is no concert of action, the medical 
 man is a negligible quantity, as to any influence, either for good or 
 bad legislation ; but united into a guild of workers, the medical body 
 would be a great power to determine the outcome of an election and 
 to direct the measures of government. 
 
 Dr. Charles J. Whalen in the Illinois Medical Journal last 
 September stated, among other things: 
 
 Medicine as a means of livelihood has arrived at the most critical 
 period of its history. The economic status and outlook for the profes- 
 sion is pitiable. A feeling exists among a large number of the pro- 
 fession that medicine should be represented more numerously than it is 
 in the legislatures. 
 
 "We should have at least as many physicians as lawyers in 
 Congress," says a recent correspondent in the Lancet-Clinic. 
 
 In its report two years ago the public-relations committee of 
 the Chicago Medical Society said: 
 
 The medical profession will never get. what it is entitled to in the 
 way of legislation until it wakes up and becomes a factor to be reck- 
 oned with politically. This can best be done by bringing the lawmakers 
 to a realization of the tremendous influence of organized medicine and 
 the votes they will lose if they do not give the profession respectful con- 
 sideration. 
 
 As an organization we should not only ask for what we want but 
 should be in a position to demand it if necessary. 
 
 In medicine, as in other forms of business, unification for mutual pro- 
 tection must be brought about. In organization lies our only hope. 
 
 From the Lancet-Clinic, of Cincinnati, for February 18, 1911, 
 under tbe title "Organization gone mad," I take this: 
 
 The American Medical Association is perhaps the best illustration of 
 the effect of the organization furore. It has become to all intents and 
 purposes a huge oligarchy. Its policies are directed by a few, who, 
 ostensibly acting as the agents of the members, in reality take the 
 initiative in every movement, assisted thereto by the constitution of 
 the society itself. The spirit of democracy is as foreign to it as it is in 
 41917— 109G9 
 
30 
 
 the realm of the Czar of all the Russias. It is the natural result of the 
 modern trend of concentration, subordinating private judgment to the 
 leaders' dictum. 
 
 Wc see the same result in the various State organizations. As in the 
 national association, so in the State societies, the thoughts of the mem- 
 bers are cribbed, cabined, and confined. If anyone so far forgets him- 
 self as to dissent from the established order, he is made to feel the 
 sting of disapproval, until he is glad to hide himself and his views from 
 the gaze of his associates. 
 
 The machine is well oiled and the steam roller runs smoothly. Mem- 
 bers are extremely careful to avoid being run over. Hence, whatever is, 
 is right. 
 
 At a meeting of the State Medical Association of Wisconsin 
 held in June, 1911, and reported in the Wisconsin Medical 
 Journal for the same month, Dr. A. R. Craig, assistant to the 
 secretary of the American Medical Association, described the 
 evolution of that body as follows : 
 
 The whole subject of the work of the organization has been to me a 
 wonderfully interesting thing. In studying this subject I have been 
 interested to find how few men really "had a suspicion of what the 
 possibilities of a real organization were. If you read the history of 
 the American Medical Association, you will find that in the old days a 
 delightful lot of gentlemen would meet together and promulgate and 
 expound and resolve and adjourn ; and in another year they would come 
 together once more in a new field and again orate and expound and 
 resolve and adjourn. So the American Medical Association went on 
 for some 40 or 50 years of its growth. True, it was gathering new 
 forms and new impetus and was doing something, but you could prac- 
 tically see nothing of the work that was accomplished except a pleasant 
 time was had at each annual session. Then came that wonderful epoch 
 in the association's life when things began to happen after a year or 
 two, and the American Medical Association met once a year, but lived 
 through the year. To-day, if you were to go to Chicago you would find 
 on the corner of Dearborn and Indiana Avenue a 7-story structure 
 with some 150 employees, your employees, working every day in the 
 year to accomplish your ends under your delegated direction, to accom- 
 plish the purposes and ends of that organization. I would like to say 
 that this organization will be completed and will be really effective 
 when each State in its turn is organized in such a way that you do 
 not meet for a week's session or a three or four days' session, but you 
 meet as a board of bank directors might meet, to determine the policy 
 of the machine which is to be effective throughout the. year. 
 
 These various quotations show that it is not the public that 
 Is demanding this legislation, but a political machine, an oli- 
 garchy of a few doctors in control of the American Medical Asso- 
 ciation, and who have so far become intoxicated with their 
 success as to forget discretion. As an illustration, let me quote 
 to you the statement of Dr. Charles A. L. Reed in a speech de- 
 livered at Chicago and widely quoted in medical journals : 
 
 When a committee of the American Medical Association went to the 
 Fifty-eighth Congress, their legislative committee said, " Can't you boil 
 down what you have to say into 20 minutes?" There were in that 
 Congress one doctor in the Senate and none in the House. 
 
 In the Fifty-ninth Congress there were three doctors in the House 
 and one in the Senate. The doctors all over the country had been 
 using their influence, so the committee said. " .lust tell us what you 
 want, gentlemen : take as much time as you like." 
 
 In the Sixtieth Congress there were five doctors, all told, and be- 
 cause of the same influence we simply went to the Willard Hotel and 
 sent for Congressmen to come to us, and they came. * * * In the 
 next Congress I have every reason to believe there will be 25 physicians. 
 
 WHY SHOULD CONGRESS INTRUST THEM WITH THIS GREAT POWER? 
 
 Mr. President, there is no complaint now of the inefficiency 
 or lack of power or authority on the part of the various health 
 bureaus now in existence and supported by the National Gov- 
 ernment. The Public Health and National Quarantine Bureau 
 is given ample and sufficient power to deal with all such ques- 
 tions. No new legislation on the subject is necessary. Even the 
 41917—10969 
 
31 
 
 bringing together of these various bureaus wlio.se province It 
 is to deal with public-health questions, attached as they are 
 to different departments of the Government and performing 
 different and varied functions affecting the departments to 
 which they respectively belong, not only will not strengthen 
 them but will result in confusion, conflicts of authority, and 
 weakness. 
 
 But, Mr. President, I desire to go a little deeper than this 
 into the wisdom and propriety of vesting in one school of 
 medicine such unlimited power over the health, even the lives 
 of the people of the country. What claims to superior knowl- 
 edge and understanding have the old school or "regulars" in 
 medicine that should induce Congress to give over to them this 
 vast power over the public health? 
 
 I have no animosities against the doctors, individually or as 
 a class. They have their work to do in the interest of man- 
 kind, and should be fully protected . in their right to pursue 
 that work. It is needed in the interest of mankind, because 
 the great majority of the people still believe in the medical 
 doctor and his drugs. So long as this is the case the physician 
 of whatever schooi should be fully and amply protected in his 
 right to administer what his patients believe in and want. 
 This must be so in a free country like ours so long as there is 
 a single individual who believes in and wants the services of 
 a medical doctor. That is what I call medical freedom. On 
 the other hand, they who do not believe in the efficacy of drugs 
 or in the services of a medical practitioner, but who do believe 
 in another and different remedy, should be accorded the same 
 right, and that right should be jealously protected. That, too, 
 is medical freedom. No one class of men who believe in one 
 mode of healing as against all others have a right to force that 
 method upon others who do not believe in it. That is tyranny 
 and a violation of the liberties of the people. 
 
 Mr. President, I have no -objection even to the American Med- 
 ical Association, so long as it confines its efforts to the advance- 
 ment of science as it sees it or for the elevation of the standard 
 of the physicians of its school of medicine, or the advancement 
 in any way of members of its own profession. I do not com- 
 plain even of its attempt to benefit its own members by legis- 
 lation. But I do object most seriously to the intolerant, tyran- 
 nical, and oppressive efforts it has been making for years to 
 prevent other schools of medicine or the practitioners of other 
 modes of healing from exercising their right to heal the sick. 
 Its course in this respect has been un-American. It is an 
 offense to free government. Its pretensions of superior knowl- 
 edge on these great and vital subjects are unwarranted. I have 
 already shown by the declaration of one of their own members 
 that the " basis of the entire profession of medicine is faith in 
 the doctor and his drugs and his methods." 
 
 If this be so, and it is abundantly supported by experience 
 and competent authority, it would seem that the one important 
 thing, the just thing for them to do, is to prove themselves and 
 their modes of healing worthy of this faith. This must be done 
 by their works. It can not be done by assailing and persecuting 
 those who have lost faith in them and their drugs and trans- 
 ferred it to others. 
 41917— 10009 
 
32 
 
 Everyone who thinks knows that the practice of medicine is 
 not a science. Remedies are adopted to-day and abandoned as 
 worthless to-morrow. The medical practitioner of 50 years ago 
 is looked upon by members of his own profession of to-day as 
 an ignoramus, and the remedies he used then are regarded as 
 wholly worthless and even as destroyers of health. Fifty years 
 from now, I predict, the men of to-day who administer drugs 
 as a means of healing will be looked back upon as enemies to 
 health. 
 
 But, Mr. President. I am not going to leave this position of 
 mine as to the unreliability of medical treatment of sickness 
 and disease to rest upon my own opinion of it, although I speak 
 from abundant and painful experience. I am going to call as 
 witnesses of the truth of what I say men of superior knowl- 
 edge and experience. The first is the late Prof. William James, 
 world-famed professor of psychology of Harvard University. 
 In an address delivered at the second hearing before the com- 
 mittee on public health of the Legislature of Massachusetts, at 
 Boston, March 2, 1898, opposing proposed legislation which 
 would exclude all but medical practitioners from exercising 
 their right to heal the sick, the professor had this to say : 
 
 Mr. Chairman, I rise to protest this bill. I come to represent no 
 body of persons with special interests, but simply as a private citizen 
 interested in good laws and in the growth of medical knowledge. The 
 medical profession are urging the bill in the interests, as they believe, 
 of true science. Those who oppose it, they think, can do so only in the 
 interests of ignorance and quackery. I hold a medical degree from 
 Harvard University. I belonged for many years to the most scientific 
 of our medical societies. I have taught anatomy and physiology, and 
 now teach mental pathology in Harvard College. The presumption is 
 that I am also interested in science. I am, indeed ; and it is, in fact, 
 because I see in this bill — along with some good intentions — a move- 
 ment in favor of ignorance that I am here to oppose it. 
 
 It will inevitably trammel the growth of medical experience and 
 knowledge. Were medicine at present a finished science, with all prac- 
 titioners in agreement about methods of treatment, such a bill as this, 
 to make it penal to treat a patient without having passed an examina- 
 tion, would be unobjectionable. But it would, also be unnecessary then. 
 No one would attempt to cure people without the instruction required. 
 
 But the present condition of medical knowledge is widely different 
 from such a state. Both as to principle and as to practice our knowl- 
 edge is deplorably imperfect. The whole face of medicine changes un- 
 expectedly from one generation to another in consequence of widening 
 experience; and, as we look back with a mixture of amusement and 
 horror at the practice of our grandfathers, so we can not be sure how 
 large a portion of our present practice will awaken similar feelings in 
 our posterity. 
 
 Each generation adds something, it is to be hoped, to the treament 
 that will not pass away. Few of us recall the introduction of the 
 water cure, but many now living can recall the discovery of anes- 
 thetics. Most of us recollect when medical electricity aud massage 
 came in, and we have all witnessed the spreading triumphs of antisep- 
 tic surgery, and are now hearing of the antitoxins and of the way in 
 which hypnotic suggestion and all the other purely mental therapeutic 
 methods are achieving cures. 
 
 Some of these therapeutic methods arose inside of the regular pro- 
 fession ; others outside of it. In all cases they have appealed to ex- 
 perieuce for their credentials. But experience in medicine seems to be 
 an exceedingly difficult thing. Take homeopathy, for instance, now 
 nearly a century old. An enormous mass of experience, both of homeo- 
 pathic doctors and their patients, is invoked in favor of the efficiency 
 of these remedies and doses. But the regular profession stands firm in 
 its belief that such experience is worthless and that the whole history 
 is one of quackery and delusion. In spite of the rival schools appealing 
 to experience, their conflict is much more like that of two philosophers 
 or two theologists. Your experience, says one side to the other, simply 
 isn't fit to count. 
 
 So we have great schools of medical practice, each with its well- 
 salisfied adherents, living on in absolute ignorance of each other and 
 41917—10000 
 
33 
 
 of each other's experience. How many of the graduates, recent or 
 early, of the Harvard Medical School have spent 24 hours of their 
 lives in experimentally testing homeopathic remedies or seeing them 
 tested? Probably not' 10 in the whole Commonwealth. How many of 
 my learned medical friends, who to-day are so freely denouncing mind- 
 cure methods as an abominable superstition, have taken the pains to 
 follow up the cases of some mind curer, one by one, so as to acquaint 
 themselves with the results? I doubt if there be a single individual. 
 Of such experience as that they say : " Give me ignorance rather than 
 knowledge." And the club opinion of the Massachusetts Medical 
 Society pats them on the head and backs them up. I don't blame any 
 set of practitioners for remaining ignorant of all practice but their own. 
 The subject is too overwhelmingly great. It takes an entire life to 
 gain adequate experience of a few diseases and a few remedial methods. 
 When a doctor notes what he considers good effects from his own prac- 
 tice, it is natural for him to let well enough alone and refrain from, 
 exploring unknown lines. Here, as elsewhere, individual success goes 
 the better for a certain narrowness, which therefore is not wholly 
 evil. But when ignorance and narrowness, instead of being humble, 
 grow insolent and authoritative and ask for laws whose only immediate 
 result can be to consecrate and perpetuate them, then I think that 
 every citizen interested in the growth of a genuine complete medical 
 science should rise up and protest. 
 
 I am here as such a citizen, having no axes to grind except the ax 
 of truth ; that " truth " for which Harvard University professes to 
 exist. I count some of the medical advocates of this proposed law 
 among my dearest friends, and well do I know how I shall stand in 
 their eyes hereafter for standing to-day in my present position. But 
 my duty is to the larger society, the Commonwealth. I can not look 
 passively, and I must urge my point. 
 
 That point is this, that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is not a 
 medical body, has no right to a medical opinion, and should not dare 
 to take sides in medical controversies. This safe neutral position the 
 friends of the proposed legislation summon the Commonwealth imme- 
 diately to give up. One would suppose that any act of sane persons 
 interested in the growth of medical truth would rejoice if other persons 
 were found willing to push out of their experiences in the mental-healing 
 direction and provide a mass of material out of which the conditions 
 and limits of such therapeutic methods at last become clear. One 
 would suppose that our orthodox medical brethren might so rejoice, but 
 instead of rejoicing they adopt the fiercely partisan attitude of a power- 
 ful trades union, demanding legislation against the competition of the 
 " scabs." They summon the State to disregard absolutely all the pecu- 
 liar conditions under which the mental-healing operations flourish to-day, 
 and say to the mind curers, " Pass our State examinations or go to 
 our State's prison." Abstractly it sounds magnificent to say that our 
 State protects its citizens against the ignorance of practitioners. In 
 the living concreteness of the matter, however, not only is such a claim 
 an utter farce, but in this particular business of mental healing there 
 can be no doubt that if the proposed law were really enforced it would 
 stamp out and arrest the acquisition of one large branch of medical 
 experience. What the real interests of medicine require is that mental 
 therapeutics should not be stamped out, but studied, and its law ascer- 
 tained. For that the mind curers must at least be suffered to make 
 their experiments. If they can not interpret their results aright, why 
 then let the orthodox M. D.'s follow up their facts and study and inter- 
 pret them. But to force the mind curers to a State examination is to 
 kill the experiments outright. 
 
 The mind curers and their public return the scorn of the regular 
 profession with an equal scorn and will never come up for the exami- 
 nation. Their movement is a religious or quasi religious movement ; 
 personality is one condition of success there, and impressions and in- 
 tuitions seem to accomplish more than chemical, anatomical, or physio- 
 logical information. 
 
 These are the facts, gentlemen. You, as legislators, are not bound 
 either to affirm or deny them yourselves, either to deplore them or 
 rejoice at them, or in any way to judge them from a medical point of 
 view, but simply, after ascertaining that thousands of intelligent citi- 
 zens believe in them, decide whether to legislate or not. Do you feel 
 called on, do you dare, to thrust the coarse machinery of criminal law 
 into these vital mysteries, into these personal relations of doctor and 
 patient, into these infinitely subtle operations of nature, and enact that 
 a whole department of medical investigation (for such it is), together 
 with the special conditions of freedom under which it flourishes, must 
 cease to be? 
 
 41917—10969 3 
 
34 
 
 I venture to say that you dare not, gentlemen, you dare not convert 
 the laws of this Commonwealth into obstacles to the acquisition of 
 truth. You dare not do it, gentlemen — and yet that is what you are 
 asked to do exactly if you pass this bill. 
 
 Pray do not fail, Mr. Chairman, to catch my point. You are not to 
 ask yourself whether these mind curers do really achieve the successes 
 that are claimed. It is enough for you, as legislators, to ascertain that 
 a large number of our citizens, persons as intelligent and well educated 
 as yourself or I, persons whose number seems daily to increase, are con- 
 vinced that they do achieve them, are persuaded that a valuable new 
 department of medical experience is by them opening up. Here is a 
 purely medical question, regarding which our general court, not being 
 a wellspring and source of medical virtue, not having any private test 
 of therapeutic truth, must remain strictly neutral under penalty of 
 making the confusion worse. 
 
 In the matter of pharmacy, in the matter of such an art as plumb- 
 ing, the legislature may impose examination and grant license without 
 harm. The facts are here ultra simple in comparison, and no differences 
 whatever of conscientious opinion among the experts as to what is 
 right. But this case of medical practice is absolutely different. It is 
 the confusion, the deplorable imperfection of the most expert knowl- 
 edge, and the conscientious divergencies of opinion, the infinite complica- 
 tion of the phenomena, and the varying and mutually exclusive fields 
 of experience that are the very essence of the case. 
 
 I know well what those friends of mine of the Massachusetts Medical 
 Society, who would presume to act as your advisers, will think. Having 
 worked as hard and as conscientiously as they have worked to acquire 
 the wisdom they possess, they will think it little less than treason in a 
 person academically brought up to depreciate publicly as I do the re- 
 sults of all those labors. They certainly thought it a gross insult when 
 I compared their noble desire to purge the State of quackery to the 
 greediness of a trades union asking for legislative protection against 
 scabs. Well, I hate to appear in my brothers' eyes as a traitor to a 
 cause which for them is identical with that of science and education, 
 and for which they will burn with so holy a zeal, for my cause is that 
 of science and education, too. Heaven forbid that I should make light 
 of the glorious achievements of modern surgery. Taking one sort of 
 education with another, a medical education is, on the whole, as broad- 
 ening and deepening an education as I know. 
 
 And if some fatality were laid on U3 whereby one type of practi- 
 tioners must perforce be singled out for license and all other types 
 stamped out, I should unhesitatingly vote to license the Harvard Med- 
 ical School type, for it lies in the spirit of science to correct its own 
 mistakes in the end, and I should hope that little by little, though with 
 infinite slowness, many of the things well known outside of the medical 
 schools, but not known there at present, might possibly be rediscovered 
 by one adventurous spirit or another inside, and finally accrete with the 
 final body of doctrine. Even the mind-cure methods might eventually 
 be resurrected in this way. But, thank heaven, no such fatal necessity 
 of giving exclusive license to one type of mind now weighs upon this 
 legislature. Our State needs the assistance of every type of mind, 
 academic and nonacademic, of which she possesses specimens. There 
 are none too many of them, for to no one of them can the whole truth 
 be revealed. Each is necessarily partly perceptive and partly blind. 
 Even the very best type is partly blind. There are methods which it 
 can not bring itself to use. 
 
 The blindness of a type of mind is not diminished when those who 
 have it band themselves together in a corporate profession. By just 
 as much as they hold each other to be thorough and conscientious there, 
 by just so much along the other lines do they not only permit but even 
 compel each other to "be shallow. When I was a medical student I feel 
 sure that any one of us would have been ashamed to be caught looking 
 into a homeopathic book by a professor. We had to sneef at homeop- 
 athy by word of command. Such was the school opinion at that time, 
 and I imagine the similar encouragements to superficiality in various 
 directions exist in the medical schools of to-day. 
 
 Now, as to calling the Massachusetts Medical Society a trades union 
 trying to influence legislation against scabs, I can hardly imagine any 
 member of the society affirming that in the movement for the present 
 bill trades-union motives are totally absent. Take a struggling prac- 
 titioner, young or old, in a small place. He has spent years of life 
 and thousands of dollars in fitting himself for his work. Conscientious 
 and self-sacrificing to the last degree, he deserves some acknowledg- 
 ment and reward. What can his feelings be when he sees the faith 
 enrer alongside and the metaphysical healer opposite, with no educa- 
 tion, with no sacrifices, with nothing but what to him seems their silly 
 
 41917—10969 
 
35 
 
 optimism and preposterous conceit, stealing patients from him by the 
 dozen? He can feel nothing but righteous indignation: and when he 
 tells the tale to his colleagues, their blood boils like his. The State 
 owes some protection to us who have done right, they say. And the 
 medical politicians who run the society's affairs, however great their 
 disinterested zeal for the public health may be — and I am the last to 
 deny that — assuredly are not altogether forgetful of this other aspect 
 of the case. The trades-union instinct has to be strong in every profes- 
 sional society. There are always some members who, if they had 
 power, would put down heresy like Spanish inquisitors, and there are 
 times when such members may come to the top. 
 
 Pray, remember all these facts, gentlemen of the committee, in listen- 
 ing to your advisers on the opposite side. Whatever you do, you are 
 bound not to obstruct the growth of truth by the freest gathering in 
 of the most various experiences. I urge that the best way to do that 
 is to say " hands off," and let the present law, which is abstractly a 
 good one, and only four years old, alone. 
 
 The hinge of my whole contention, you see, is that in strictly medical 
 quarrels the State has no right to interfere. I know there are other 
 aspects of this bill with which every decent man must sympathize. 
 The flood of quackery and medical ignorance about us is sickening to 
 think of. One's first impulse is to get up and scream, saying : " Why 
 is there not a law to stop it? " One's heart bleeds, one's fingers itch at 
 the persistent impunity. But so it is with the vileness of our news- 
 papers, with their medical advertisements and other filth, so it is with 
 the rottenness of much of our public life. Yet laws can not reach such 
 symptoms. Heine said : " Every nation has the Jews it deserves." 
 Certainly every nation has the newspapers and the politicians it de- 
 serves. And it has the medical practice it deserves. A people that 
 loves quacks will have them, laws or no laws. Instead of crying for 
 legal protection, the medical profession ought to educate the people 
 better. They must remember that the aversion which they find in the 
 public and from which they suffer, has historic roots. The history of 
 medicine is a really hideous history, comparable only with that of 
 priestcraft — ignorance clad in authority and riding over men's bodies 
 and souls. Let modern medicine dispel all those inherited prejudices 
 by living the historic memories down. It may well be questioned 
 whether a regime of license and monopoly will tend to hasten that even 
 as much as one of freedom and conciliation. 
 
 Above all things, Mr. Chairman, let us not be infected with the 
 Gaelic spirit of regulation and reglementation for their own abstract 
 sakes. Let us not grow hysterical about lawmaking. Let us not fall 
 in love with enactments and penalties because they are so logical and 
 sound so pretty and look so nice on paper. Let us cultivate a robust 
 Anglo-Saxon spirit of insensibility and tolerance, toughening ourselves 
 manfully to the sight of much that we abhor, and of still more that we 
 can but imperfectly understand. The death rate is not rising, in spite 
 of all quackery. That shows that we are not in any crisis of danger, 
 and surely justifies you in letting well enough alone. 
 
 Mr. President, the broad-minded view thus taken of this ques- 
 tion by one who has been educated in a medical school, and 
 whose sympathies were clearly with that school of healing, 
 makes one think better of his country. It is a bright light 
 shining out of the darkness of intolerance and bigotry. 
 
 The bill was defeated in Massachusetts, much to the credit of 
 the State. The effort to secure its passage was attempted again 
 this year, as it has been every year for several years past, but 
 the effort signally failed. It is said, whether truthfully or not 
 I do not know, that Prof. James was reprimanded by the then 
 president of Harvard University for his utterances on this occa- 
 sion and cautioned against repeating them, the reason given 
 being that it was a direct reflection on the Harvard Medical 
 School. 
 
 The estimation in which medical healing is held is indicated 
 by the following editorial from the San Francisco Call: 
 
 Medical, hygienic, and therapeutic freedom will supply the subjects 
 for consideration at the conference of the northern California branch 
 of the League of Medical Freedom, which meets in this city on Thurs- 
 day. The league represents a movement that stands for liberty and 
 freedom from the dictation of this or that school of medicine. It is 
 41017—10969 
 
36 
 
 constitutionally and radically opposed to setting up an official orthodoxy 
 in the practice of medicine. It is opposed to the movement that would 
 place in the hands of one school au artificially created authority to 
 enforce its doctrines, practices, and beliefs on an unwilling public. 
 
 If medicine were an exact science there might he some apology for 
 the legal enforcement of orthodox practices, but this is notoriously not 
 the case. " Doctors differ " as much and as widely to-day as they did 
 a hundred years ago. For example, the believers in Christian Science 
 are legion and, although they are not medically orthodox, we know, 
 everybody knows, that they have accomplished valuable and even mar- 
 velous results. The movement formulated in the Owen bill, now pend- 
 ing before Congress, for the creation of a national health department, 
 is intended primarily to set up a medical orthodoxy invested with 
 power, if not to prohibit, at least to hamper, practitioners and patients 
 who do not hold the tenets of a regular school. 
 
 There are a dozen differing schools of medicine, and one of these 
 seeks a monopoly created by law and invested with authority to make 
 things unpleasant for all whom they regard as medical heretics. 
 
 Mr. President, it is not only that the practice of medicine is 
 not a. science and is uncertain and unreliable, but the political 
 and tyrannical methods used by the doctors in attempting to 
 force through objectionable and oppressive laws are subversive 
 of liberty. The following, from the Columbus Medical Journal, 
 shows how the people regard such methods : 
 
 MEDICAL GRAFT OPPOSED. 
 
 The doctors have a bill before the legislature in the State of Cali- 
 fornia which, if passed, will give them complete control of the public 
 schools and reduce our school children to a medical tyranny that could 
 not be duplicated anywhere on earth. The following is an account of 
 it, taken from one of the California papers : 
 
 "A bill in the legislature, drawn by Prof. Leslie, a public-school 
 teacher of Los Angeles, is being fought by the National League for 
 Medical Freedom. It is urged by the allopathic, or regular, doctors. 
 
 " The bill provides for the establishment in the public schools of 
 California of ' health and development supervision.' Practically this 
 means, as elaborated in the bill, the hiring by the State of hundreds of 
 doctors, dentists, nurses, experts in all the various branches of mental 
 and physical upbuilding, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars 
 a year. These doctors would examine and treat pupils free. 
 
 •' Besides the work of these medical men in the schools, Prof. Leslie 
 adds : 'An effective follow-up service, which shall bring about effective 
 cooperation between parents, teachers, aud school authorities in meeting 
 the demands of health, growth, and efficiency of pupils, students, and 
 teachers ; said follow-up service shall be conducted by examining staffs, 
 assisted by trained nurses and social-service workers.' 
 
 " The bill puts all this under the direction of a State director of 
 health and development at $4,000 a year. Assisting him would be an 
 immense staff of physicians and all the adjuncts of hospitals, labora- 
 tories, gymnasiums, etc. 
 
 " With county medical directors, as planned, there might be 58 of 
 those doctors alone. The possibilities for graft under the bill are 
 tremendous. The University of California is designed to furnish the 
 main supply of experts for the work. As its medical schools are both 
 allopathic, it is readily seen that the bill plays into the hands of the 
 Medical Trust, now firmly rooted in California, and would furnish it a 
 new and magnificent field of operation and profit. 
 
 " It goes without saying that no regular physician would appoint or 
 work with others of differing schools. The bitterness of the opposing 
 factions in the curative sciences is intense. Leslie, the author of the 
 bill, who has been here for weeks pushing it, is a humanitarian, ap- 
 parently without guile, but his measure is believed by legislators who 
 have examined it perfectly fitted to make a powerful politico-medical 
 machine which would run schools, pupils, and parents for the benefit of 
 the allopaths. 
 
 " The allopaths maintain a lobby here right along. Besides, through 
 their influence as family physicians to a majority of the more pros- 
 perous citizens of the State, they have decided influence with the heads 
 of these families throughout California. All this influence is being 
 used, except by those allopathic doctors who see the evil of the bill. 
 
 " The National League for Medical Freedom is against the measure. 
 This league is composed of members of all the other schools of medi- 
 cine, surgery, etc., other than the allopathic. The homeopaths, osteo- 
 paths, naturopaths, eclectics, Christian Scientists, and others think the 
 bill iniquitous. 
 
 41917— 109G9 
 
37 
 
 " The objections of the league are stated briefly : 
 
 " There is no necessity for such a bill. It is un-American, tyranni- 
 cal, and abridges individual liberty. 
 
 " It opens up possibilities of looting the State treasury and increas- 
 ing taxation through the employment of an army of physicians and ex- 
 perts and the establishment of numerous special schools. 
 
 " It opens a way for one school of medicine to obtain a medical 
 monopoly and give them a strangle hold on the public schools which 
 could not be shaken off in years. 
 
 " The league says that the enactment of the bill into law would be 
 the beginning of medical slavery and State medicine. A fine and im- 
 prisonment is to punish State employees who fail to carry out the pro- 
 visions of the bill." 
 
 " The bill was introduced into the assembly by Assemblyman Cattell, 
 of Los Angeles. The allopathic physicians of Californa, through the 
 State Medical Association and its agents here, are determined to get it 
 through." 
 
 Fortunately for the good name of California, this iniquitous bill was 
 defeated. 
 
 Following is another account of how they do it in Illinois : 
 [Copy of a letter circulated in Illinois.] 
 Chicago Medical Society (Organized 1S52), 
 
 Secretary's and Treasurer's Offices,, 
 
 September 6, 1910. 
 Dr. E. LandoSj Chicago, 111. 
 
 Dear Doctor : In the primaries of the respective political parties to 
 be held September 15, the following candidates are deserving of con- 
 sideration at the hands of the medical profession residing in the 
 twenty-fifth senatorial district : Messrs. Crocker, Waage, Freund, and 
 Olson, each having agreed, if elected, to support the medical profession 
 and the public in the forty-seventh general assembly in their effort to 
 prevent the passage of any vicious medical legislation. 
 
 At the last session of the legislature your Representative Breidt 
 voted "Yes" for senate bill 214 (osteopathic), but did not vote on 
 senate bill 351, which was in substance the same as No. 214. As no 
 organized effort was made to prevent the enactment of No. 214 until 
 after its passage in the senate, and the fact that senators voting for 
 the bill in many cases did so under the impression that the bill met 
 with approval of the medical profession, we therefore feel that no 
 effort should be made to punish anybody for voting yes on 214, but with 
 351 the situation is different. They should he held strictly accountable 
 for voting yes on No. 351. 
 
 Mr. Hulzee voted " No " on 214 ; was absent or not voting on 351. 
 Deserving of your condemnation politically is Charles L. Fieldstack, 
 who voted " Yes " on No. 214, and, in spite of the missionary work that 
 was done and the pressure brought to bear from his physician con- 
 stituents, he repeated the dosage by voting " Yes " on 351, and he 
 should be held strictly accountable for so voting, as both were vicious 
 measures granting special privileges to certain cults who desired to 
 enter the practice by a short and easy route — medicine. It is incum- 
 bent upon the physicians in the twenty-fifth senatorial district to see 
 that Mr. Fieldstack is eliminated politically on September 15. 
 
 Every family in the twenty-fifth senatorial district is attended by 
 some member of our profession. Our power is great if we make a 
 concerted move. It is up to you to do your part. Will you do it? Let 
 us hear from you. 
 
 Fraternally, yours, 
 
 Alexander H. Ferguson, M. D., Chicago, 
 
 President. 
 Alfred C. Cotton, M. D., Chicago, 
 
 President. 
 Geo. F. Suker, M. D., Chicago, 
 
 Secretary. 
 Edmund W. Weis, M. D., Ottawa, 
 
 Secretary. 
 J. V. Fowler, M. D., Chicago. 
 J. M. Lanin, M. D., Chicago, 
 
 Chairman. 
 M. S. Marcy, M. D., Peoria, 
 Chas. J. Wiialen, M. D., Chicago, 
 
 Chairman. 
 Public Relations Committee of Chicago Medical Society, 
 
 Committee on Medical Legislation, 
 
 Illinois State Medical Society. 
 41017—10909 
 
38 
 
 N. B. — Most voters have no special choice and few will refuse their 
 family doctor. Get husy. There is another point you want to re- 
 member : If you happen to be of opposite political faith, it is no reason 
 that you have not 50 or 100 friends that you can see who are of the 
 same " political faith as the candidate. Don't forget the " personal 
 favor." We ask you to see 50 or 100 friends that are voters. Do you 
 realize what this means? Eleven thousand physicians in Illinois seeing 
 the number indicated would amount to the following : Eleven thousand 
 times 50 equals 550,000 voters. This means victory, something that 
 each individual physician should feel proud of. Talk it over with your 
 brother practitioners and clients. 
 
 I submit another newspaper item from Medical Freedom, 
 taken from the New Orleans Times-News. It shows such per- 
 nicious activity and indecent haste to secure the appointment of 
 a public official who would be friendly to the legislation the 
 doctors were seeking as to excite just indignation, and the ex- 
 tent to which they propose to go in the effort to procure favor- 
 able action by Congress: 
 
 TO SUCCEED WYMAN AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION SAYS SELECTION 
 
 OF DE. WHITE, OF NEW ORLEANS, WILL INSURE DEPARTMENT OF 
 HEALTH- — DR. M'CORMACK, POLITICAL MASTER OF THE A. M. A., STARTED 
 HIS MACHINE WORKING BEFORE GEN. WISIAN'S FUNERAL DATE HAD 
 BEEN SET. 
 
 It has been no secret that the A. M. A. opposed the late Walter 
 Wyman, Surgeon General of the United States. Its members made 
 many demands for his retirement because he did not use his office to 
 lobby for their pet measure — the National Department of Health. The fol- 
 lowing item from the New Orleans Times-News bureau naively tells a 
 story of political selfishness, haste, and bad taste that would be almost 
 incredible if it emanated from elsewhere than the " political doctors." 
 
 The item reads : "A boom has been launched, having for its object the 
 landing of Dr. J. H. Whyte, head of the United States Marine-Hospital 
 Service at New Orleans, for the vacancy as Surgeon General, caused by 
 the recent death of Dr. Walter Wyman. The effort comes from Bowling 
 Green, Ky., and the Louisiana State Board of Health was apprised of it 
 in a letter received from Dr. Joseph McCormack, of that place, and a 
 member of the council of health and public instruction of the American 
 Medical Association, which booms Dr. Whyte for the place enthusi- 
 astically. 
 
 " The following is the text of the letter sent Dr. Oscar Dowiing, presi- 
 dent of the State board of health, New Orleans, La. : 
 
 " '" Dear Doctor : Am just in receipt of a telegram announcing the 
 death of Gen. Wyman. Am writing to know if you will at once bring 
 every influence to bear on President Taft, through your Senators, Repre- 
 sentatives, and others, to have Dr. Joseph H. Whyte, of New Orleans, 
 appointed as Surgeon General. He is one of the strongest men in the 
 service, has always been an active advocate of the National Department 
 of Health, and his appointment almost assures its creation. 
 
 " ' Trusting in your full cooperation, and asking to hear from you, I 
 am, 
 
 " ' Cordially, yours, J. H. McCormack, M. D.' 
 
 I have no doubt that Dr. Whyte is a very worthy man and 
 would have made a good Surgeon General, but it is fortunate, 
 that he was not appointed with such influences behind him. It 
 is quite likely that his support defeated him, for the President 
 knew of this letter before the appointment was made, and the 
 President is a just man possessed of a high sense of decency 
 and the proprieties. 
 
 COLLECTION AND DISSEMINATION OF INFORMATION. 
 
 The bill provides: 
 
 That it shall be the duty of the bureau of health to collect and dis- 
 seminate information relating to the public health. 
 
 This is one of the most deadly provisions in the bill. This 
 Government is now spending hundreds of thousands of dollars 
 to send broadcast the details of sickness, disease, and suffering. 
 It is by this means planting the seeds of disease and killing 
 more innocent and unsuspecting people than drugs ever saved. 
 
 41 ill 7— 10900 
 
39 
 
 The people are being taught to think of sickness, disease, and 
 death when they should be thinking of health and life. Doctors 
 are traveling all over the country describing the symptoms and 
 causes of tuberculosis and other life-destroying diseases, not 
 only to grown men and women, but to school children. They 
 describe the so-called disease germs or microbes and their effects 
 on the body, and picture, by word of mouth and by charts, illus- 
 trated lectures, and moving pictures, the ravages of the disease. 
 These horrifying and gruesome pictures and senseless and in- 
 human details of the causes and ravages of disease excite the 
 very fear that breeds and fosters disease. These lectures are 
 given in the schools and innocent children are made their vic- 
 tims. Instead of being encouraged it should be made a crime. 
 
 I have a letter written by a lady to the League for Medical 
 Freedom calling attention to one case of this kind. Fortunately 
 the chief offender in this case was not a doctor. He was the 
 representative of the Antituberculosis Society. But the incom- 
 prehensible thing about it is that the teachers and officers of 
 the public schools in an enlightened community should allow 
 such an outrage to be committed. The letter is as follows : 
 
 Inclosed please find a few clippings that may be of interest to you. 
 Mr. Dee Brown — he is not a doctor of medicine, but of philosophy — is 
 being paid by the Anti-Tuberculosis Society to come here and enter on 
 a campaign of a month to address all the schools in the city and edu- 
 cate them along the lines of symptoms and their results of this disease. 
 They started in on Friday, and it happened that they went to the 
 grade schools on the west side — that is, those that are in the section 
 we call the Union School — by noon they reached the Union High and 
 assembled the high-school children in one of the rooms. He went into 
 the minutest detail of the symptoms of this disease, and told them 
 that they might have the disease and not know it ; that many times 
 the tissues of the lungs were so badly gone before the patient knew 
 that he had the disease that there was no help for him. He said some- 
 times you may have a tired feeling in the morning; this is one of the 
 marked symptoms. You may have a flush on your cheeks, and not 
 know this is one of the worst symptoms, and he went on down the 
 line. He filled the children so full of fear that one beautiful tall girl 
 fell in a dead faint on the hard floor, striking on her temple, and they 
 were obliged to call a carriage and send her home, and when one of 
 the teachers called at the home Saturday afternoon she had not re- 
 gained consciousness enough to realize what had happened to her. She 
 is still under a doctor"s care, with a very bad black eye and face. Two 
 other girls were helped out of the room and one or two others braced 
 up by the teachers, and the boys fairly turned pale. 
 
 Everybody supposed, of course, he was a physician, and they could 
 not understand his unprofessional way of presenting his subject to 
 these children. They teach these children to have implicit confidence 
 in what they teach them, and. of course, their thought is receptive. 
 After the talk the children stood around in groups and expressed them- 
 selves as being very much disturbed because they were obliged to 
 listen to such stuff, and a number of them went fo the teachers after- 
 wards and asked why they were obliged to listen to it. 
 
 Monday morning he went to the Central High, and his talk was the 
 first hour. They locked the session doors and compelled all the 
 children to enter the general assembly hall. 
 
 Saturday. Sunday, and Monday we got busy on this work, and did 
 all we could to have the lecture toned down and the worst part elimi- 
 nated, but now we are setting about to have the entire lecture course 
 eliminated. We have appealed to the parents of our city, as many as 
 we can reach over the phone, and asked them to send in protests to the 
 board of education. Last evening was the regular monthly meeting of 
 the board, and a few went up to the meeting and personally protested, 
 which resulted in a committee of three being appointed to investigate 
 the matter and hear some of his lectures. I do not think he will dare 
 to give again the talk that he gave to the Union High children. 
 
 This man has just finished a campaign in Wisconsin, covering the 
 State completely, and he has now entered Michigan to do the same 
 thing. I am going into detail, thinking it may be^of some help to you 
 with the work in the State, and if Detroit has planned for a similar 
 campaign you will be better prepared to head it off. 
 41917—10969 
 
40 
 
 We had a talk with the girl's attending physician and he said it 
 was outrageous. Such talk should never be allowed in even one in- 
 stance, etc. He gave us the privilege of using his name, hut, as he has 
 stated, he is not an agitator and he is not one to stir things up much. 
 
 I hope you will advertise this, for it needs all the publicity we can 
 give it. Mr. Weston is writing an article for us this week and we are 
 going to send out 500 of them to the parents of school children. We 
 have a meeting of the executive committee of the league this afternoon 
 and we will plan something in the way of a protest. We are doing all 
 we can to have it eliminated from the schools, and if they want to give 
 such talks to give them to the adults. 
 
 With best wishes to all, 
 
 Sincerely, Frances W. Spearman. 
 
 Mr. President, see bow this idea grows. Here is another en- 
 lightened guardian of the public health proposing to educate 
 children in the knowledge of disease by introducing moving 
 pictures of the ravages of tuberculosis and disease germs. He 
 got the idea from a young girl who had learned to " describe 
 the formation and construction of tuberculosis bacillus to a 
 surprising degree," he says. And she got this gruesome in- 
 formation from illustrated lectures in Carnegie Hall, in New 
 York. Here is the account given of it by the Memphis Press: 
 
 As to the paths to be pursued before this term end by public-school 
 children in search of facts pertaining to health welfare, it is probable 
 that " a child shall lead them." For it was a child's knowledge of 
 things beyond the ken of physiology textbooks in the public school 
 which set Dr. M. Goltman, city healther, to thinking out a plan for 
 furthering the knowledge of school children in the matter of health. 
 
 As a result lectures on health subjects, illustrated by moving pictures, 
 will sooner or later become a feature of public-school instruction. This 
 will follow the advent of more school inspectors, which Dr. Goltman 
 is now striving to have added to the meager force. 
 
 " I got my idea from conversation with my 13-year-old niece in the 
 East," said Dr. Goltman. " She was able to describe the formation and 
 construction of tuberculosis bacillus to a surprising degree, aDd slie 
 knew other things a growing child should know, and knew them in the 
 right way. I was astounded, and asked if she learned those things in 
 school. She said no ; that she attended illustrated lectures at Carnegie 
 Hall and like places, because she was interested. These places are 
 open to those who care to attend in New York, but I thought to myself, 
 ' Why not build up a course of study and instruction in the public 
 schools along those lines?' And if I have my say, Memphis will have 
 the first regular course in its public schools of health and hygiene with 
 the aid of moving pictures, thus going New York one. better iD its 
 estimable work." 
 
 One would think this fearful raid on the health and lives of 
 the children might stop there. But the doctors seem to be vie- 
 ing with each other in efforts to disease the minds of innocent 
 children and ignorant adults. At the sixty-fifth annual meet- 
 ing of the Ohio State Medical Association Dr. C. C. Probst, of 
 Columbus, in an address on " The protection of child life," said : 
 
 More progress would be made if no further effort were made to 
 " teach old dogs new tricks," but attention should be devoted to the 
 training of the school children in hygiene and sanitation and physical 
 education. This would mean a new man in school life — a school physi- 
 cian. It would mean school supervision, not school inspection. 
 
 And at the sixty-first annual meeting of the American Medi- 
 cal Association, at St. Louis, June, 1910, the use of the theater 
 as a means of conveying information about disease and disease 
 germs was recommended. Dr. Masyck P. Ravenal, of Madison, 
 Wis., had this to say on the subject : 
 
 In regard to the use of the theater for instructing the public along 
 the lines of preventive medicine, may I tell you what we have done in 
 Wisconsin ? Many of you have probably seen ncrtiees in the news- 
 41017 — 10969 
 
41 
 
 papers of the play " In Germland." This was given by the young, 
 ladies taking work in the department of bacteriology and hygiene at 
 the University of Wisconsin. The characters were all dressed in cos- 
 tumes representing as nearly as possible various germs as we see 
 them in stained preparations, both the useful and the harmful germs 
 being represented. No charge was made for admission, cards of invi- 
 tation being issued. It was given as a department matter for our own 
 entertainment and instruction, yet the demand for admission from 
 outside taxed the resources of our hall to the utmost, and throughout 
 the country the greatest interest was excited. 
 
 Our stage scenery was made as instructive as possible. We showed 
 dirty roller towels on the wall, spittoons, garbage cans marked " No. 
 23," the common drinking cup, the common sponge, the feather duster, 
 the broom — emphasizing as much as possible the bad features of such 
 things. We had a large rat trap containing the rats which the women 
 have been wearing in their hair so much of late. A garbage barrel 
 filled with broken bottles and tin cans was called the " Germ-ania 
 Theater," and the play announced was " The Place, the Man, and the 
 Germ." 
 
 These things as we presented them were quite amusing. They catch 
 the popular eye and at the same time give a great amount of instruc- 
 tion to those who have never thought on such matters before. This 
 play is being revised and improved, and during the coming year is to 
 be put on the stage by professionals. I am sure this sort of work will 
 do an enormous amount of good in educating the public. 
 
 But the height of cruelty and folly seems to have been reached 
 by the Kansas State Board of Health. It has published a 
 '" health almanac." In its number of December, 1911, the board 
 assumes to let the people know what diseases they may look for- 
 ward to each month in the year. It opens with a repulsive pic- 
 ture of a woman cruelly pitted with smallpox, with the state- 
 ment under it, " Never vaccinated." But this is not really the 
 worst of it. They take a page of their so-called almanac for a 
 disease with the following headings: "January for smallpox, 
 February for pneumonia, March for measles, April for whooping 
 cough, May for good wells and good water," with the cheering 
 statement for May that — 
 
 Bad or impure water is more dangerous than the deadliest poison 
 and always affects those who drink it. Wells are polluted by organic 
 matter getting into them. This matter comes from human beings or 
 from animals and is always bad for those who drink it. If it comes 
 from a case of typhoid or from a person who carries typhoid germs and 
 gets into the well it will produce typhoid fever in those who drink it. 
 
 June for infants' complaints, July for flies and mosquitoes, 
 August for typhoid fever, September for diphtheria, October for 
 scarlet fever, November for colds and influenza, and December 
 for consumption. 
 
 These doctors, if they are worthy of the name, know that two 
 great causes of disease are fear and suggestion and that sugges- 
 tion is the prolific cause of fear, disease, and death. And yet 
 they deliberately send out broadcast, at public expense, a sug- 
 gestion — probably a false one, but that makes no difference — 
 that in each month of the year a specific and deadly disease 
 may be expected and feared. It is the refinement of cruelty 
 and the depth of ignorance in a matter of life and death if it 
 is not malicious. This persistent suggestion of disease and its 
 alleged causes is creating more disease and sacrificing more 
 lives than are all the germs that have been discovered or 
 imagined by man. 
 
 Mr. President, I said a moment ago that I thought the height 
 of cruelty and folly had been reached by the State board of 
 health of Kansas, but I have discovered something even worse 
 41917—10969 
 
42 
 
 than that. What is called "A circular for school children " 
 has been distributed in some of the schools of this country that 
 seems to me to go further in the way of spreading improper in- 
 formation than anything I have yet seeD It pictures a small 
 boy examining disease germs through a microscope. The cir- 
 cular says : 
 
 Then there are so many had fairies which cause disease. Different 
 kinds of them cause different diseases. * * * These little fairies 
 are called bacteria or germs and are the smallest of all living things. 
 They are found everywhere — in the air. the soil, the water, in our 
 bodies. A quart of well water would contain a million of them. 
 
 Then follow illustrations of the different kinds of deadly dis- 
 ease germs with a statement under each group of the diseases 
 they cause. Then the circular undertakes, by illustration, to 
 show how the germs of tuberculosis are carried. The point of 
 a pencil is pictured, covered with such germs as come from 
 the mouth of the victim, and the picture of a fly is set out with 
 its legs loaded with disease germs. A picture of a sick man in 
 his invalid chair is given, with children taking some of his 
 food from a spoon, with the statement under it : " The germs 
 that attack us come from the bodies of the sick." Other pictures 
 of the means by which disease is conveyed are given. 
 
 An emaciated consumptive, apparently in the last stage of 
 the disease, is pictured as spitting upon the floor, and a woman 
 sweeping up the sputum after it has dried. A little child is 
 pictured as sitting near by, with the statement under this pic- 
 ture, " The germs may enter the bodies of children playing on 
 the floor." Two persons are pictured as sitting at a table, one 
 of them a consumptive, with the statement below it, " Others 
 may get the disease by breathing " ; and still another case, a 
 small boy, emaciated by the disease, taking a bite of something, 
 with two healthy-looking little fellows standing by, saying, 
 " Give us a bite," with the statement under this picture, 
 " Putting food, money, pencils, etc., into the mouth after a 
 consumptive has poisoned them with his spit." 
 
 Now, Mr. President, I can not conceive of anything more cruel 
 and inhuman than the loading of the minds of little children 
 with such information as this. Physical ill treatment or abuse 
 can not be compared to it, and yet I find the superintendents 
 and teachers of the schools and boards of education not only 
 permitting this sort of literature to go into the schools but 
 actually encouraging it. They may be partially excused by 
 their apparent ignorance of the palpable consequences of such 
 impressions upon the minds of the young, because like a good 
 many other people in this country they do not think for them- 
 selves or try to understand the effects of such suggestions as 
 this circular contains, but accept it because the doctors approve 
 it. I am sorry to bring to even the attention of the United 
 States Senate such brutal and inhuman suggestions; and when 
 one thinks of filling the minds of children with this kind of 
 stuff, it is nothing less than horrifying. 
 
 Fortunately, some public officials, not doctors, are humane 
 
 and sensible enough to attempt to stay this fearful filling of 
 
 the minds of children with these hideous details of disease. 
 
 The mayor of San Francisco, Cal., is one of these. I submit 
 
 41017— 109G9 
 
43 
 
 for the consideration of the Senate an editorial in the San 
 Francisco Star of February 12, 1912: 
 
 A WORD FOR THE MICROBES. 
 
 Here are recent words of Mayor Rolph that are commended to your 
 consideration : 
 
 " I think you should go slow about the methods of eradicating 
 tuberculosis. I hear so many mothers in the mission say that this 
 tuberculosis scare has been so driven into the minds of their children 
 that they come home saying they are filled with aches and pains, and 
 have backaches and stomach aches and one thing and another. I heard 
 this discussed last night, and that germs of every human ill have been 
 shown on magic-lantern slides — pictures that make children get the 
 idea that their bodies are covered with germs. I do think that you 
 ought to be very careful to first study out well the effect of all this 
 and prevent what is evidently intended to make children think they 
 are filled with all kinds of diseases, when you know, as a matter of 
 fact, they are not, and that what you are really trying to do is only 
 to prevent disease." 
 
 Amen. Also hallelujah and God save us. The mayor is right. A 
 child may be scared into sickness as well as safeguarded against it. We 
 have overworked the microbes, poor things. They are good, bad, and 
 indifferent, but no matter how irreproachable their character our chil- 
 dren have been indirectly inoculated with the idea that they should be 
 regarded as malefactors and goblins. 
 
 The fact is that man has slowly educated himself up to the point 
 where he is scared to death by death. This is why 10,000 fads of 
 healing bud and blossom in our midst. I remember very well when a 
 stomach ache was cured by Jamaica ginger and a mustard plaster. 
 Now the chances are that nothing but removing the vermiform appendix 
 will do the business ; after that, if one has a stomach ache he may try 
 the old remedies. 
 
 Again, the mayor is right. We show our kids pictures in which 
 human flesh is portrayed as the grazing ground of all sorts of apparent 
 antediluvian monsters. What wonder if the half-formed minds of the 
 children get the idea that there is not much hope for them ; if they are 
 "filled with aches and pains and have backaches and stomach aches"? 
 Deuce take it ! how can they expect anything else with megatheriums 
 and other bacilli at work? 
 
 The Ohio State Journal in its issue of November 27, 1911, 
 contained this sensible editorial on this subject: 
 
 THINKING HEALTH. 
 
 We find this very suggestive paragraph in a book entitled " Phil- 
 osophy of Self-Help " : 
 
 " The most prevalent and the most dangerous of all forms of infec- 
 tion is mental. It is far easier to get bacteria out of the body than 
 to eradicate disease germs from the mind once they get in. Thinking 
 and talking about disease prepare the mental soil for its reception. 
 Fear and expectancy promote its growth." 
 
 We apply this thought to medical inspection of schools, which tends 
 to fill the minds of the children with thoughts of disease. It is en- 
 tirely uneducational to do so. It is the easiest thing in the world to 
 transfer an ailment of the body into a disease of the mind, and when 
 that becomes a child's condition, he goes through the schools carrying 
 a heavy load. And that condition of the mind tends to promote disease. 
 One disturbs the free activity of the mind by turning it in on physical 
 ills. 
 
 The besc hope of health is to think health, and that suggests the sort 
 of education a child is entitled to. It will be a hard matter for even 
 a well child to grow grand and good out of a consciousness of surround- 
 ing physical ills. 
 
 Mr. President, the doctors are using every means possible to 
 get themselves into the schools. They are trying to teach un- 
 thinking people that this is necessary to the public health. 
 What a dreadful mistake ! The presence of the doctor who 
 thinks nothing and talks nothing but disease, is full of fear of 
 microbes and the thousands of causes of disease that had better 
 never have been known, is little better than a death's head in 
 
 41917—10969 
 
44 
 
 the schoolroom. Better have someone to teach the children 
 that good is more powerful than evil; that we make disease by 
 thinking it ; and to be thinking of better and higher things than 
 the material causes of disease. This will never be a healthy 
 Nation until the people are freed mentally from this dreadful, 
 all-pervading fear of disease. Men and women burdened with 
 all these false beliefs and fears are slaves to their wrong view 
 of life. 
 
 Mr. President, this nefarious onslaught on young children 
 and the spread of disease through suggestion and fear has 
 grown worse and worse. And now the Government is to be 
 asked to become a party to this spreading of disease by collect- 
 ing and disseminating like information for the whole country 
 to read. What a fearful responsibility must rest upon the 
 people who are disseminating such information. 
 
 Every doctor worthy of the name knows that fear is one of 
 the most prolific causes of disease. He knows, too, that sug- 
 gestion of disease is equally deadly in its effects, especially on 
 the timid and fearful. And yet, with full knowledge of this, 
 they set about in the most direct and forceful way to suggest 
 the existence and presence of the very diseases they claim to 
 be combating and to implant in the minds of the old and young 
 the fear that engenders the disease. If the evidence of this 
 cruel wrong was not so direct and positive it would be beyond 
 belief. A very interesting article on the effects of fear, by Di;. 
 Orison Swett Marden, was published in the Philadelphia Even- 
 ing Bulletin February 24, 1912, and is worthy of the attention 
 of the Senate. It is as follows: 
 
 Fear in all its different phases of expression, such as worry, anxiety, 
 anger, jealousy, timidity, is the greatest enemy of the human race. It 
 has robbed man of more happiness and efficiency, has made more men 
 cowards, more people failures, or forced them into mediocrity, than any- 
 thing else. 
 
 Fear has a paralyzing, blighting influence upon the whole being. It 
 impoverishes the blood and destroys health by impairing the digestion, 
 cutting off nutrition, and lowering the physical and mental vitality. It 
 crushes hope, kills courage, and so enfeebles the mind's action that it 
 can not create or produce. 
 
 Many people are afraid of nearly everything. They are afraid of a 
 
 draft, afraid of getting chilled or taking cold, afraid to eat what they 
 
 want, to venture in business matters for fear of losing their money, 
 
 afraid of public opinion. They have a perfect horror of what Mrs. 
 
 Grundy thinks. They are afraid hard times are coming, afraid of 
 
 poverty, afraid of failure, afraid the crops are going to fail, afraid of 
 
 lightning and tornadoes. Their whole lives are filled with fear, fear, 
 
 'fear. 
 
 ******* 
 
 Fear strangles originality, daring, boldness ; it kills individuality and 
 weakens all the mental processes. Great things are never done under a 
 sense of fear of some impending danaer. All work done when one is 
 suffering from a sense of fear or foreboding has little efficiency. Fear 
 always indicates weakness, the presence of cowardice. What a slaugh- 
 terer of years, what a sacrificer of happiness and ambitions, what a 
 miner of careers this monster has been ! 
 
 One of the worst forms of fear is that of a foreboding of some evil to 
 come, which hangs over the life like a threatening cloud over a volcano 
 before an eruption. 
 
 Some people are always suffering from this peculiar phase of fear, 
 They are apprehensive that some great misfortune is coming to them, 
 Hint they are going to lose their money or their position: or they are 
 afraid of accident or that some fatal disease is developing in them. 
 If their children are away, they see them in all sorts of catastrophes — 
 railroad accidents or shipwrecks. They are always picturing the worst. 
 ******* 
 
 41917— 109G9 
 
45 
 
 The fear habit shortens life, for it impairs all the physiological proc- 
 esses. Its power is shown by the fact that it actually changes the 
 chemical composition of the secretions of the body. Fear victims not 
 only age prematurely, but they also die prematurely. Oh, how many 
 victims fear has put into the grave. It has driven people into all sorts 
 of crime through unbalancing the mind. It has caused terrible trage- 
 dies in human life. 
 
 There is not a single redeeming feature about fear or any of its 
 numerous progeny. It is always, everywhere, an unmitigated curse. 
 
 A man who is filled with fear is not a real man. He is a puppet, a 
 manikin, an apology of a man. 
 
 Quit fearing things that may never happen, just as you would quit 
 any bad practice which has caused you suffering. 
 
 Mr. President, the dangers of disease and death are kept 
 constantly in the public mind. People are warned to avoid this 
 and shun that, and taught to believe this means one disease 
 and that another, until the weak in body or mind are brought 
 under the influence of this powerful suggestion and the strong 
 are not always able to throw it off. Man is afraid of the food 
 he eats, the water he drinks, and the air he breathes. Pos- 
 sessed with fear, he shuns certain foods that he thinks are 
 hurtful, he shuts out the fresh air, and drinks boiled or bot- 
 tled water. He has become a very craven, the slave of his 
 unreasonable fears. I have heard a Member of this body declare 
 that he could not ride from the Capitol to the Office Building 
 in a closed subway without taking cold, and therefore he walked 
 while others rode. Another is afraid to take a drink of ice 
 water, because if he drinks it it paralyzes the stomach. Last 
 summer when the thermometer hovered about 90 the Sergeant 
 at Arms had electric fans placed in the Senate to relieve the 
 heat, but if one was put in motion it was ordered stopped. 
 Some one was afraid it would give him cold. And so it would, 
 probably; not because a little fresh air could give anyone cold, 
 but because of his fears. If he could learn not to be afraid, 
 and no one else were afraid for him, be would never take 
 cold. Job said, " That which I greatly feared hath come upon 
 me." So it is with the man of to-day. To fear disease is 
 to invite it. Disease is wholly mental. The material body, 
 without mind, has no sensation. Destroy consciousness and 
 the body does not feel. The condition of mind reacts 
 on the body and makes it sick or well, according to the 
 thought either of the individual or others who think about 
 him. Hatred, malice, revenge, fear, and other wrong thoughts 
 are the breeders of disease. Every competent physician will 
 tell you so. And yet these same physicians are doing more to 
 excite the fears of the people than everybody else. And they 
 are here now, urging Congress to authorize the Government to 
 put out printed information that will feed the fears of the peo- 
 ple of the whole Nation and engender more diseases and sacri- 
 fice more lives than ever the doctors will heal or save. If the 
 people could once be taught to think and talk health and not 
 disease, harmony and not discord, faith and trust and not fear, 
 life and not death, a health department need not be thought of. 
 If the people could only be taught to trust in an omnipotent 
 and good God instead of the doctor and his remedies, and 
 thereby cast off all fear, disease would be unknown. To one 
 having some of this faith and trust that dispels fear in the 
 degree that one trusts and understands, the thought that is 
 41917—10969 
 
4G 
 
 bestowed upon disease, sickness, and death, and the power that 
 is given to them in the human mind is little less than appalling. 
 
 Mr. President, I can not keep silent and allow this Nation to 
 become a party to this monstrous propaganda of fear and dev- 
 astation of its people. 
 
 Some of the doctors have realized this and sounded a warn- 
 ing. Dr. P. L. Myer, of Toledo, Ohio, in an article published 
 in the Journal of the American Medical Association as far 
 back as 1906, says : 
 
 Had we not better hedge a little before the great lay mind grasps 
 the fact that they were frightened into panicky laws and restrictions 
 over will-o'-the-wisp possibilities and not probabilities or actualities? 
 * * * * * * * 
 
 With all the wonderful strides of our science in 100 years, we still 
 have the public as abjectly cowed to-day, before the omnipotent hosts 
 of bacteria, as it was by the evil spirits and ghosts and witches of a 
 past century. 
 
 And in 1910 the Journal of the American Medical Associa- 
 tion has this very pertinent statement of prevailing conditions : 
 
 An aversion to unnecessary contamination by noxious microorganisms 
 may well serve as a protection against disease ; but an insane terror 
 of infection may make life very miserable without appreciably length- 
 ening or strengthening it. In the first place, the paradise of faultless 
 prophylaxis — -the aseptic Eden which seems to be the ideal of the 
 gerihophobes — is unattainable. We can not banish microorganisms 
 from our human world ; we can only try to keep that balance of con- 
 ditions most favorable to the life of the human organism. In the 
 second place, the attitude of mind, cultivated in the perpetual endeavor 
 to evade disease, may be almost a worse evil than the disease itself ; 
 certainly it furnishes the best excuse for the existence of those sects 
 which deny the existence of all disease and the usefulness of any pre- 
 cautions. " Life is a dangerous thing at best, and very few of us 
 get out of it alive," while those of us who spend all our energies 
 trying to elude its incidental risks might almost as well never have 
 lived at all. Health is largely a matter of a proper balance of op- 
 posing forces, and that balance can be preserved, in part, by cultivat- 
 ing a due measure of indifference to inevitable dangers. 
 
 From the Ohio Medical Journal of July, 189S, after comment- 
 ing upon the annual meeting of the American Medical Associa- 
 tion of that year, this is interesting : 
 
 The political part of the convention continues to be managed by 
 medical politicians ; these gentlemen constitute a sect apart, coming 
 chiefly from St. Louis and Louisville, and who come with everything 
 cut and dried. 
 
 To which the Atlantic Medical Weekly of August 6, replied: 
 
 But granting it, * * * most of the members attend the sessions 
 of the American Medical Association for other reasons and with other 
 purposes than to engage in political bickerings, and are only too glad 
 there are others to do this work for them. * * * They get but an 
 empty honor, forgotten before the next session, and have a great deal 
 of labor for their pains. 
 
 WOULD FORCE LEGISLATION. 
 
 From a report of the one hundred and third annual meeting of 
 the Medical Society of the State of New York, held at Albany, 
 January, 1909, and published in the Journal of the American 
 Medical Association, February 6, 1909 : 
 
 If the incoming national administration fails to establish a national 
 department of health the public health committees of the State medical 
 societies should add their force in making public sentiment sufficiently 
 strong to force this movement through. 
 41917—10969 
 
47 
 
 Dr. Larkin, of Hillsboro, Ohio, in an address to his local 
 county society, a branch of the American Medical Association, 
 said : 
 
 We want to make the influence of the county society so strong that 
 no decent, self-respecting physician can be without its portals. We 
 want to make its local influence so great that no legislator can ignore 
 its warnings, and when we ask in the name of humanity that certain 
 laws be enacted for the general good they will heed our demands and 
 be only ready to do our commands. 
 
 From the remarks of Dr. H. A. Beaudoux, president- of the 
 North Dakota State Medical Association, at the twenty-second 
 annual session of the same, held at Fargo, May, 1909, and pub- 
 lished in the Journal of the American Medical Association, June 
 5, 1909: 
 
 We are better equipped to pass sane and important legislation than 
 any other body of men and to make ourselves felt in public matters 
 owing to our intimate relations, as family physicians and advisers, with 
 the voters throughout the State. 
 
 It seems that Prof. Irving Fisher, who was chairman of the 
 committee of one hundred, must have had some doubt of the 
 sincerity and unselfish humanitarianism of the American Med- 
 ical Association, for in Dr. McCormack's report of the executive 
 committee, June, 1910, at St. Louis, he has this to say about the 
 professor : 
 
 I was impressed at the outset of our acquaintance that he had not 
 seen the best side of our profession and had some of the prejudices, 
 only more frankly expressed, of the average layman as to its aims and 
 attainments ; and asked him to make the same careful study of its 
 plans of organizations and purposes that he had given to other problems, 
 with the result that he soon became one of our most appreciated 
 friends. 
 
 Of Senator Owen he writes: 
 
 Soon another great layman, Senator Robeet L. Owen, of Oklahoma, 
 entered the lists as our official advocate in the National Senate. * * * 
 It has been one of the greatest privileges of my life to be intimately 
 associated with these two lay friends of ours, Owen and Fisher, etc. 
 
 Sometimes some more conservative counsels intervened, but 
 they were promptly suppressed. At a council of the associa- 
 tion an attempt was made by one of their number to check the 
 political activities of the organization, but it was a melancholy 
 failure. The following account of it appeared in the Illinois 
 Medical Journal of March, 1912 : 
 
 Dr. Henry B. Favill, of Chicago, presided and uttered an address 
 which was quite remarkable, and led up to the most dramatic climax 
 it has ever been our privilege to witness. Dr. Favill's remarks were 
 to the effect that the activities of the profession in political matters 
 had brought about considerable criticism from a portion of the public. 
 We had been accused among other things of being " a professional 
 trust," of using " trade-union methods," etc. Because of these disa- 
 greeable statements Dr. Favill thought it the part of wisdom to at once 
 abandon our efforts along political lines and depend altogether on our 
 efforts to educate the people. * * * 
 
 THE DRAMATIC CLIMAX. 
 
 Scarcely had the chairman taken his seat, ready to call for the next 
 order of business, when Dr. J. M. McCormack, of Kentucky, sprang to 
 his feet, and in eloquent language called attention to the stand taken 
 by the parent organization at the Los Angeles meeting. The repre- 
 sentatives of the organized profession, duly elected and clothed with 
 plenary power, had pledged the organization at its annual meeting to 
 a continuation of the contest which it had commenced, and instructed 
 41917—10969 
 
48 
 
 Its committees and its journal to use their utmost endeavors to pro- 
 cure the passage of the Owen bill. If it should go out to the public 
 that this conference, after all that had been said and done, had to-day 
 taken a different stand, and should by its silence give consent to the 
 doctrinaire sentiments of the chairman, a blow would be struck at the 
 good faith of the profession from which it would never recover. Mr. 
 Owen, who had taken his life and his political fortune in his hands in 
 advocating our cause, would go down to a disgraceful defeat, and the 
 blood of this sacrifice would be on our hands. 
 
 It has been the studied effort of the American Medical Asso- 
 ciation to secure teachers, particularly in the public schools, to 
 cooperate with them. In this way they could reach the young 
 people and bring _ them under their influence, thereby securing 
 the influence of ' the teachers themselves as affecting public 
 sentiment. Dr. McCormack, who was the leading spirit in all 
 efforts to extend their organization and increase its strength 
 and influence, had this to say on that subject at the Atlantic 
 City session in June, 1909 : 
 
 I am constantly impressed with the possibilities of this work before 
 educational bodies and schools, and especially in institutions which are 
 engaged in preparing teachers, editors, lawyers, clergymen, and other 
 leaders of public cpinion for their life work. The popular distrust of 
 the profession, ordinarily passive but ready to become active and to be 
 utilized by the various quack and other antagonistic interests, can 
 scarcely be overestimated, and probably can never be eradicated from 
 the once infected adult mind. The experience of recent years has 
 convinced me that with the aid of the teachers and schools, an aid 
 which will be curs for the asking anywhere, a generation of voters and 
 legislators can soon be so trained that the vast interests represented by 
 preventive medicine will come to be appreciated as among the most 
 important and cheaply and easily conserved of the Nation's resources, 
 the unselfish aims and purposes of the profession will be recognized, and 
 constructive statesmanship can be submitted for the time-serving po- 
 litical methods which have so long obtained in our public affairs, local. 
 State, and National. For these and other reasons which can not be 
 enlarged on here, I would urge such an alliance between physicians and 
 teachers in every section of the country as will make all that it in- 
 volves in our work matters of common knowledge. In short, tbe future, 
 as I see it, was never so full of promise, if the people can be frankly 
 taken into our confidence and more sense and greater dignity can be 
 made to obtain in our relations with the public and public affairs. 
 
 The doctor seemed to be impressed with the idea, evidently 
 well founded, that the doctors composing the organization are 
 not in public favor. He seemed to think that an alliance with a 
 respectable body like the teachers would relieve them from this 
 feeling of distrust. Unfortunately, too many teachers have 
 unwittingly been made the instruments of the association for 
 such a purpose. 
 
 The following article entitled " The county board of health," 
 by Dr. W. S. Rankin, secretary of the State board of health of 
 Raleigh, N. C, shows something of the length to which they are 
 going in the effort to mold public sentiment, and secure outside 
 help : 
 
 EDUCATIONAL WOEK. 
 
 Here is a vast field of unlimited possibilities wherein the board of 
 health may do its most important work. 
 
 The educational efforts of the board of health have three possible 
 agencies through which to find expression, the public school, the pulpit, 
 and the press. 
 
 The receptive and pliable mind of developing citizenship is the most 
 prolific soil in which to sow the seed of sanitary regeneration. Cer- 
 tainly there is nothing more vital to the future welfare of all the 
 people than that our school children shall be taught the value of 
 health, that it is fundamental to all other possessions, and that it is a 
 thing that can be easily conserved or easily wasted. There is a law 
 41917—10969 
 
49 
 
 that requires our public schools to teach Ritchie's Primer of Sanitation 
 to all pupils in the seventh grade. County hoards of health should see 
 to it that this law is rigidly observed. 
 
 In the December Bulletin we suggested the purchase by the county 
 of an acetylene lantern and slides. The entire outfit can be obtained 
 for ?100. If the county board of health would invite the cooperation of 
 the county medical society and work out with that organization a 
 program of lectures to be given by the members of the couuty medical 
 society to the various public schools in the county, nothing would go 
 further in arousing the sanitary conscience of the county. The lectures 
 should be given at night in the public schoolhouses. A week preceding 
 the lecture the county superintendent of schools should forward to the 
 teacher of the school a quantity of handbills announcing the lecture, 
 and these could be distributed through the school children throughout 
 the community. If the county medicial society does not care itself to 
 prepare a set of standard lectures on important sanitary subjects, the 
 State board of health will be very glad to furnish these lectures already 
 prepared, so that little time will need to be given the matter by the 
 individual members of the county medicial society. For fuller detail 
 in regard to this plan see 313 of the December (1911) Bulletin. 
 
 Another very effective method for emphasizing the importance of the 
 study of sanitation in the schools and for securing the interest of the 
 children, and one that has been put to extensive use by many progress- 
 ive communities, is the offering of prizes for compositions on public 
 health subjects. Asheville, Wilmington, and Smithfield, among other 
 towns in North Carolina, have adopted this idea. A county in Alabama 
 obtained such splendid results in increasing the interest of the people 
 in matters of sanitation through a series of prizes offered in the public 
 schools of the county for compositions on tuberculosis, sanitation, flies, 
 etc., as to have attracted national attention. What has been done in 
 Alabama can be done in North Carolina. 
 
 The county medical society should nse its influence with the news- 
 papers of their county to secure the publication of articles bearing upon 
 public health. The newspapers of North Carolina recognize the im- 
 portance of this public opinion and are lending the use of their columns 
 unstintedly for the promotion of public health. County boards of health 
 should keep the editor of the county paper informed in regard to local 
 conditions and events that affect the public health. The State board 
 of health prepares weekly newspaper articles on the subject of public 
 health and sends them to all the newspapers of the State. If your 
 county paper has not been publishing some of these articles, the board 
 of health might call attention to the possible oversight and use its 
 influence in securing more frequent references to this matter, which 
 should deeply concern the public. 
 
 Mr. President, the full title of Ritchie's primer, referred to in 
 the last article, is " Primer of sanitation : Being a simple work 
 on disease germs and how to fight them." And the following 
 are the subjects treated in this so-called work on sanitation : 
 
 Why the study of disease germs is important. 
 The cells of the body. 
 
 Disease germs and how they get into the body. 
 The struggle between the body and the germs. 
 Bacteria. 
 The skin. 
 
 The pus-forming bacteria. 
 Tetanus (lockjaw). 
 The air passages and the lungs. 
 Diphtheria. 
 Pneumonia. 
 
 Influenza, whooping cough, and colds. 
 Tuberculosis. 
 
 The -treatment of consumption, 
 Disease germs in dust. 
 The 'alimentary canal. 
 Typhoid fever. 
 
 Diseases caused by relatives of the typhoid germ. 
 Other bacterial diseases of the intestines. 
 Disease germs in water. 
 Other .bacterial diseases. 
 Protozoa. 
 
 Malarial fever and yellow fever. 
 41917— 109G9 4 
 
50 
 
 Mosquitoes. 
 
 Smallpox. 
 
 Other protozoan diseases. 
 
 Intestinal worcns. 
 
 The importance of sanitation. 
 
 The housefly. 
 
 Disease germs in food. 
 
 Disinfection. 
 
 Unhygienic habits. • 
 
 Public sanitation. 
 
 What governments can do to preserve the public health. 
 
 Practical sanitation. 
 
 Tliis is the kind of reading that is being offered to the chil- 
 dren of the country and attempted to be forced upon them, for 
 the study of the book has already been made compulsory in 
 the State of North Carolina and, I understand, in some other 
 States. 
 
 There has been much complaint that the earnings of the 
 doctors have been falling off. Hence the extraordinary efforts 
 through political means and unjust restrictive legislation to re- 
 trieve their fortunes. At the meeting of the San Francisco 
 Medical Society in January, 1S99, Dr. Charles G. Kuhlman read 
 a paper in which he showed that the average earning capacity 
 of California's 3,000 doctors should be $5,000 each per annum, 
 but because " irregular " physicians were allowed to practice 
 and of bad debts it was only $850, or one-sixth of what it should 
 be, entailing a loss to the " regular " doctors of that State alone 
 of $10,000,000 per annum. 
 
 That was certainly a bad showing for the regulars. He urged 
 as a remedy " a better organization of the medical profession 
 into a distinct corporation and which should be, to be perfect 
 in its results, not merely local or State but national in its char- 
 acter." The doctor's advice was taken. Now the regulars have 
 just such an organization as he hoped for, and it has not hesi- 
 tated to use every means within its reach, political and other- 
 wise, to circumvent the irregulars and put them out of business. 
 To this end they have spent millions of dollars, and the people 
 are no better off, nor have the regulars increased their earning 
 capacity or increased for themselves the public respect or con- 
 fidence. Their case is no better, but seemingly worse, than it 
 was before, as indicated by the following extract from the New 
 York State Journal of Medicine of March 12, 1910: 
 
 The profession has not fared well at the hands of legislators. The 
 legislation secured to elevate the standard of the profession and protect 
 the public from quacks has resulted, with the help of the same legis- 
 latures, in turning turkish-bath rubbers into doctors, and the optician 
 has succeeded in usurping some of the most delicate functions of the 
 physician. If the legislature continues to license successive schools of 
 quackery, we may well question the wisdom of State control of license 
 to practice medicine. On account of this and on account of the general 
 education in hygiene and preventive medicine, the income of the pro- 
 fession has been greatly diminished. The remedy would be to increase 
 the fees, but this could not be effected without thorough organization 
 and loyalty to each other on the part of the doctors. The New York 
 .Tourna'l says, further, that it is the universal opinion that an agreement 
 in regard 'to fees would not be respected, and that this assertion is 
 striking proof that there is real distress in our ranks and that medi- 
 cine is degenerating into a vulgar game of grab or sordid struggle for 
 mere existence. 
 
 This shows a very distressing condition of things for the 
 
 regulars; but it never seems to occur to them that the error 
 
 may be with them. It is inconceivable to them that they could 
 
 by any possibility be " irregular " and some other mode of 
 
 41917—10909 
 
51 
 
 healing the true or even a better one than theirs. It is not 
 theirs to learn, but to stick dogmatically to the contention that 
 no one can be right but them. Other people have seen their 
 error and the falsity of their ideas of healing, but they seem 
 incapable of appreciating a patent fact that millions of people 
 have learned to their inestimable advantage. 
 
 Mr. President, there is still another side of this important 
 question that should not be allowed to escape the attention of 
 the Senate. It is this : I have already pointed out that the 
 medical activity of the Government in all its branches is in the 
 hands of and completely under the influence and control of one 
 school of medicine, and every publication sent out as informa- 
 tion coming from the National Govei'nment is now, and will 
 continue to be under this bill, the views of one school of medi- 
 cine, and that a school which has been largely discredited. 
 When the Government becomes the publisher and distributor of 
 information obtained by and relating to this school of medicine, 
 it establishes a State medicine and makes it strictly sectarian. 
 This is bound to continue just so long as one school of medicine 
 is intrusted with the management of health matters. It may 
 be said that this bill provides against discrimination as between 
 different schools of medicine. But while the bureau is under 
 the control of one school and no physician or surgeon of any 
 other school is employed by the Government, such a provision 
 amounts to nothing. The Government has maintained this sec- 
 tarianism in medicine for over 40 years. Its health activities 
 have been completely dominated by one sect to the exclusion of 
 all others. 
 
 The Government has no more right to sanction or support 
 sectarianism in medicine than in religion. One is just as nmch 
 of a violation of the freedom of the citizen as the other. There 
 are millions of people in this country who believe in the homeo- 
 pathic and eclectic modes of healing, and millions more who do 
 not believe in drug healing of any kind. But not one of these 
 has any recognition whatever by the Government as represented 
 by the present medical bureaus, nor will they have under this 
 bill if it becomes a law. 
 
 By these publications the Government is simply promoting 
 the views of one school of medicine to the exclusion of all others. 
 And worse still, they are not a report of established or known 
 facts, but of mere opinions opposed to the views of other equally 
 competent schools of medicine, and generally found in the end 
 to be erroneous. Such a publicity bureau shuts out the views, 
 opinions, investigations, and discoveries of every other school 
 of medicine, composed, in part, of some of the ablest men and 
 brightest minds in the country. If we take the publications of 
 the present health bureaus, and the people of this country were 
 dependent upon them for their information, they would never 
 know that a homeopathic, eclectic, or any other school of medi- 
 cine or healing existed. And if the bureaus should speak on the 
 subject, it would be to discredit any school but the one. If such 
 publications are of any use to the public, they should be made 
 nonsectarian and inform the people of every discovery, advance, 
 or change in health affairs from whatever source and without 
 bias or prejudice. 
 
 This could never be expected from present bureaus or any 
 consolidation of them. The chief reason is that this legislation 
 41017—10000 
 
52 
 
 is sought by and in the interest of one school of medicine. No 
 other school is asking for or favors it. The people do not ask 
 for it and do not understand it. 
 
 SEKU1I TIIEEArT. 
 
 Mr. President, the old school of medicine has now taken up 
 the idea of serum therapy, so called, or the prevention of 
 disease by inoculation of supposed disease-preventing serums 
 extracted from diseased animals. In the case of smallpox we 
 have had this alleged preventive for many years. The efficacy 
 of vaccination has never been proved. It has from the be- 
 ginning been stoutly denied, and ample proof has been given 
 that it is not a preventive, notwithstanding the National Gov- 
 ernment, and State, county, and city authorities compel the 
 people, including young children, to submit to the poisoning of 
 their blood by this loathsome treatment. The National Gov- 
 ernment forces it upon its soldiers and sailors by the strictest 
 penalties. Children whose parents are opposed to it are denied 
 school privileges, and other penalties are imposed to compel 
 submission to vaccination, whether the people want it or not. 
 It is almost beyond belief that any enlightened Government would 
 thus trespass upon the liberties and personal rights of its citizens 
 in such ways upon the mere opinion of doctors, and opinions 
 that have never been substantiated, but have been discredited and 
 disproved over and over again. And now the doctors say 
 typhoid fever can be prevented by a serum that has been dis- 
 covered lately, and the Government at once accepts this opinion 
 and forces it upon its soldiers, sailors, and employees. Then 
 the school children will be forced to accept this new and equally 
 dangerous system of poisoning. Like remedies are being dis- 
 covered for other diseases, until everybody will have to submit 
 to have his body inoculated with various poisons, on the theory 
 that he will thus be made immune from every known disease. 
 The whole thing is too absurd to talk about. It results from 
 the fact that the doctors have learned that the old remedies 
 will neither prevent nor heal disease, and they are losing their 
 business and public confidence. The administration of these 
 pretended preventive remedies is a very lucrative business, and 
 when people are compelled to take them it is easy to get 
 patients. 
 
 The practice of vaccination is condemned by physicians and 
 scientists and all classes of people. The following from the late 
 Moneure D. Conway, one of the great men of this country, illus- 
 trates what men of learning and information think about it : 
 
 A considerable number of good people are just now suffering fines and 
 imprisonments because they will not suffer their children to be vacci- 
 nated. Their very excellencies as parents cause them to be dealt with 
 as malefactors. Here, say, are two men : One gives uninquiring assent 
 to what other thoughtless people assent to ; he doesn't care much what 
 happens to his child, delegates to usage the duty of thinking for it, 
 gives it up to be baptised, catechised, vaccinated, flogged at school — to 
 anything that is usual, whether right or not. The other man gives no 
 uninquiring assent ; he studies carefully that his family may be nour- 
 ished with truth aud maintained by such laws of health as he can dis- 
 cover. Now, of these two the careless parent is favored by the vacci- 
 nation law, while the thoughtful, anxious, and devoted parent is pun- 
 ished unless be adopt a prescribed opinion. A law which thus favors 
 parental indifference and discourages careful thought and conscientious 
 devotion to the child's welfare reverses the spirit of all just laws. Of 
 course it is equally probable that the thinking parent may be able to 
 agree with the majority ; but he may not, and in this case he suffers 
 41917— 109G9 
 
53 
 
 for bis inquiry, while the other escapes — no man being so safe from the 
 results of thought, erroneous or right, as he who never thinks at all. 
 
 Vaccination has been seriously challenged by men of learning. The 
 misgivings concerning it have not arisen from ignorance and prejudice, 
 but from men of science and medical men. These arguments have been 
 sufficiently strong to shake the convictions of eminent thinkers and 
 political leaders — such as Herbert Spencer, Prof. F, W. Newman, Dr. 
 Garth Wilkinson, William Ewart Gladstone, W. E. Forster, John 
 Bright — in the justice of the law, and of some of them in vaccination 
 itself. The arguments which have influenced such men — leaders of 
 large numbers of people — can not be met justly except by fact and argu- 
 ment. To answer by mere force is tyranny. The reasoning objectors 
 have been answered only by fine and imprisonment, which are as gen- 
 uinely persecutions as if inflicted for the nonbaptism of children, on the 
 ground that such children may become foci of heretical infection. To 
 those who dissent from it vaccination is merely a medical dogma. To 
 coerce parents into its practice rests upon that assumption of medical 
 infallibility which has again and again been proved false, as in the 
 instance of inoculation, once generally practiced, now penal ; as in the 
 example of bleeding, that barbarous practice to which Washington and 
 Cavour fell victims while opening new vistas of civilization. Even 
 were physicians unanimous in their faith in vaccination, they could not 
 claim infallibility after having so often erred, while, as a matter of 
 fact, there is less unanimity in that profession about vaccination than 
 there was at one time in favor of the now discredited inoculation. 
 
 And this is the way the Government punishes its citizens for 
 presuming to deny the right of its officers to poison their blood 
 by this process : 
 
 [From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.] 
 
 MEDICAL TYRANNY IN NAVY. 
 
 Resistance to the advice and instructions of medical officers in the 
 Army or Navy is construed as Insubordination as serious as resistance 
 to the orders of other commissioned officers. Because they refused to 
 submit themselves to the new antityphoid inoculation, a number of the 
 crew of the battleship Vermont, in Cuban waters, are being punished 
 as virtual mutineers. 
 
 There was a time when disobedience to the orders of a chaplain 
 involved as grave consequences to members of the organized military 
 forces. Army and Navy policies which make mutineers of faithful 
 men with intelligence and individuality enough to object to the intro- 
 duction of noisome, poisonous substances into healthy bodies can not. 
 command popular approval. 
 
 If vaccinations for "various diseases were prescribed a condition at 
 the time of enlistment, the men would have the option of consenting 
 to it or declining to enter the service. To "impose after enlistment 
 vaccination on men ,in violation of their will and judgment is a misuse 
 of military authority. It can not be justified on the ground of neces- 
 sity in the absence of an epidemic. So far as typhoid is concerned, it 
 can be combated in entirely unobjectionable ways through sanitation. 
 
 This is a subject with which Congress should deal. 
 
 When one comes to consider this subject, the evidences against 
 its compulsory imposition are so numerous that one can select 
 but few of them for use in an address of this kind. No 'one 
 can truthfully deny that thousands of lives, many of them of 
 little children, have been sacrificed to this vile practice. But, 
 again, the people do not or will not think for themselves. ..To 
 them the opinion of some doctor who knows no more than they 
 do about it is sufficient and they go no further. Those who do 
 think for themselves and refuse to submit to the treatment for 
 their children must lose their right to send them to the public 
 schools. If the doctors agreed about it, it would not be so .bad. 
 But they do not. Many of the ablest doctors of all times, since 
 it came into use have denied that it is of any value and assert 
 that it is a most dangerous remedy. In an appeal to the people 
 of Pennsylvania by certain inhabitants of Bangor, Northampton 
 County, they say : 
 
 The inhabitants of Bnngor, Northampton County, in public meeting 
 assembled, on Friday evening, March 20, 1907, issue this appeal to the 
 "11917—10909 
 
54 
 
 people of Pennsylvania to join with them in restoring the principles of 
 civil liberty in this Commonwealth, which have been outraged by the 
 enforcement of the compulsory vaccination laws. 
 
 On November 5 last, one of. the brightest and best of children, 
 Hershel, the S-year-olcl son of Frank N. Love, a respected citizen of 
 Bangor, was vaccinated in order to obtain admission to school, as re- 
 quired by the 12th section of the act of June 18, 1895. Within 17 days 
 he was dead, after suffering what no tongue can tell. The poison was 
 put into his little body, but the doctors could not get it out. 
 
 The father and mother of this victim of State-enforced blood poison- 
 ing have one remaining child, a little girl, who is now of school age. 
 But a cruel law, which" still remains unrepealed upon the statute books 
 of this State, denies to this child the right of education guaranteed by 
 our Constitution, unless her already grief-stricken parents again, make a 
 sacrifice to the Moloch of vaccination. 
 
 * • * * * » * 
 
 The tendency of vaccination to spread smallpox and its worthlessness 
 as a preventive have been illustrated in our own State, where the dis- 
 ease has been most prevalent and fatal in those localities where vacci- 
 nation has been general. In Philadelphia during the 10 years imme- 
 diately preceding the enforcement of the vaccination school law, from 
 IS85 to 1S94, there were 113 deaths from smallpox, while daring the 
 four years from 1901 to 1904. when the law was being strictly en- 
 forced, there died in the Municipal Hospital of smallpox 7G0 persons. 
 It is estimated that the vaccinations performed during that outbreak 
 were about 500.000 in number. In Marietta, where vaccine is manu- 
 factured from the virus of smallpox, there were more than 50 cases in 
 1S05. But in Erie, where it has been found impossible to enforce vac- 
 cination, there has been only one death from smallpox in £5 years, and 
 in Waynesboro, where the entire population is opposed to vaccination, 
 there lias not been a case of smallpox since the Civil Y\~ar, nor a death 
 from that disease for G4 years. 
 
 The spread of smallpox is. however, one of the least of the evils 
 chargeable against vaccination, for physicians who have independently 
 investigated the subject tell us that the words of Scripture, that " The 
 life of all flesh is the blood thereof.'' are literally true, and that the cor- 
 ruption of the blood defiles the fountain of life, making disease neces- 
 sary to purify the system and prevent degeneration. Vaccination standi 
 indicted by the common sense of mankind, tbe teachings of religion, and 
 the voices of the world's greatest -scientists and sanitarians, including 
 Alexander von Humboldt. Florence Nightingale. .John Pickering, Sir 
 "William J. Collins. Herbert Spencer. Alfred Russel Wallace. Alexander 
 Milton Ross. Montague R. Leverson. Charles Creighton. Edgar M. Crook- 
 shank, and many others of like eminence. It has poisoned the blood of 
 countless multitudes and placed upon its victims the stamp of consump- 
 tion, syphilis, cancer, and many other terrible diseases. 
 
 ******* 
 
 If the functions of government were strictly limited to the exercise 
 of its just powers, grounded in nature, and derived from the consent of 
 the governed, and if all arbitrary authority were abolished, there would 
 be no compulsory vaccination laws, and the history of Pennsylvania 
 during the last two years would not have been sullied by the slaughter 
 of Dale lams, of Washington County : Lottie Bentzel. of Cumberland 
 County ; George Baker, of York County, John L. Hilt, of Lancaster 
 County, Beatrice Bausouville. of Pittsburgh, and many other little inno- 
 cents by State-enforced blood poisoning. 
 
 The attitude of certain political doctors who are members of the 
 legislature in presuming to dictate to more than 6.000,000 people in 
 this Commonwealth concerning their own flesh and blood, encouraged as 
 it has been by the attempt of health officials to use the power and pat- 
 ronage of their offices to influence the course of legislation, we denounce 
 as being opposed to the spirit of our institutions. 
 
 ******* 
 
 When a few political doctors, animated by the selfish and infamous 
 desire of a clique in the medical profession to increase its profits by 
 diseasing the entire population of this State, can block the remedial 
 legislation demanded by an overwhelming majority of the people an 
 issue i* raised which must be carried to every hamlet and fireside. Shall 
 a politico-medical oligarchy, supported by the public revenues, be per- 
 mitted to compel any person to submit to a surgical operation, or shall 
 the free institutions guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States 
 be maintained in this Commonwealth? Shall a union of medicine and 
 State be permitted to enslave the bodies of men, women, and children 
 in a community in which the principles cf religious liberty and tolera- 
 tion have been upheld for two centuries and more? 
 41917— 109G9 
 
55 
 
 Mr. J. P. McLean has this to say in the Dayton (Ohio) News 
 of October 26, 1910: 
 
 AGAIXST VACCINATION. 
 
 Editor Daily News : I will avail myself of the opportunity of con- 
 tributing an article on " Vaccination " for the reason that I believe that 
 this cult is the greatest crime against nature ever recognized, and is far 
 worse than war. famine, and pestilence. One article will not permit me 
 to go into details, nor. treat the subject as I would desire. The fact that 
 antivaccination societies are numerous in Great Britain, America, and 
 Canada and other countries, indicates that there is a widespread dissent 
 and opposition to the cult. If to this be added the names of the great- 
 est pathologists, physicians, surgeons, naturalists, statesmen, etc., 
 then it is well to pause and consider. I will here confine myself to some 
 of the reasons why the ranks of the opposition are extending, though I 
 may not follow the natural sequence. 
 
 In all probability the opposition to the cult arises principally from 
 the fact that it is a propagator of a fatal disease. This point is easily 
 proven from the fact " that all lymph, however pellucid, does really 
 contain blood cells." (Unanimous opinion of the Royal Commission on 
 Vaccinations, final report, p. 112.) If, then, vaccine matter always con- 
 tains blood cells, then whatever disease the source of the supply may 
 have, will be propagated in the victim. Dr. Alexander Wilder, the most 
 brilliant and versatile physician America ever produced, says : " Con- 
 sumption follows in the footsteps of vaccination as directly as an effect 
 ever follows a cause. The vaccine poison being the product of decaying 
 animal tissue, and often tuberculosis in character, must naturally pro- 
 duce its like wherever it finds the suitable opportunity." (See his" Fal- 
 lacy of Vaccination," p. 13.) He quotes from Prof. Bartlett, of the 
 medicine department of the University of New York, who stated that 
 " in 208 children who had been vaccinated. 3S died of tubercular con- 
 sumption and 170 of other maladies. In 95 who were not vaccinated 
 30 only died of consumption and 63 of other diseases." 
 
 The Medical Times and Gazette, London, for January 1, 1834, called 
 attention to the fact that consumption had widely spread since the in- 
 troduction of vaccination. That during the 10 preceding years it had 
 slain 68,204 in the metropolis alone. The report of the registrar general 
 for 1669 gave the number of deaths at 53,794 from the cause alone. 
 Dr. Wilder is supported by such men as St. Gervais, Hufeland. Hertwig, 
 Grisolle, Constadt, Bedaur, who also enumerated about 30 more diseases. 
 
 Dr. Jasuco Copland (Dictionary of Medicine, vol. 3, pp. 140, 141) 
 says : " Notwithstanding the laudation bestowed upon vaccination, I be- 
 lieve that as the lapse of time allows the fact to he more fully demon- 
 strated it will be found to he a not unfruitful source of scrofula and 
 tuherceles." Even Dr. Felix von Niemeyer says that vaccination in chil- 
 dren may leave behind it the germs of a disposition to consumption 
 (p. 22). He further adds: "I must protest against unconditional com- 
 pulsory vaccination, particularly during the lirst two years of life." I 
 might extend this, but enough has been said. 
 
 Cancer is another rapidly increasing disease. Does any person know 
 even of a single case of this disease in a human being who was never 
 vaccinated ? It is a frightful disease, and fatal. Several years ago 
 Dr. Wilder wrote in that of his own knowledge he knew this disease to 
 be bovine. Hutchinson (Illustrations of Classical Surgery, vol. 1, p. 
 141) has illustrated a case of lupus in and around a vaccination scar, 
 and cases of a like nature have been described by Besnier (Annales of 
 Dermatologie at tie Syphiligraphie, vol. 10, p. 576), Lennander (Upsala 
 Lakareforennings Forhandlinger. vol. 25, pp. 65-70) ; and Colcott Fox 
 (The Practitioner, vol. 6, p. 500). 
 
 Judging by reports, lockjaw is not uncommon after vaccination. I 
 need only to refer to the statements of Dr. J. H. Cottman (New Or- 
 leans Medical and Sureical Journal, vol. 2, p. 783), Dr. -George Ross 
 (The Southern -Clinic, -vol. 1, p. 468), Dr. Theodore Dimon (St. Louis 
 Courier of Medicine, vol. 7, p. 310), Dr. H. J. Berkeley (Maryland Med- 
 ical Journal, vol. 9, p. 241). Dr. W. T. Bates (Transactions of the 
 South Carolina Medical Association, vol. 32, p. 105), etc. 
 
 Without multiplying the list of diseases with accompanying refer- 
 ences, I will conclude this portion of the article by stating that the 
 celebrated physician. J. J. G. Wilkinson, gives a list of 56 different dis- 
 eases caused by vaccination. Dr. Alfred R. Wallace, the most eminent 
 of living naturalists, estimates that vaccination is the annual cause of 
 10,000 inocular diseases in Great Britain. I presume the Dayton 
 library has his " Wonderful Century." If so, then read what he says 
 on the vaccination delusion. 
 
 Perhaps it mav be well at this point to call attention to Circular 
 147, issued Juno 16, 1909, by the Department of Agriculture, which re- 
 41917—10969 
 
56 
 
 lates to the outbreak of the foct-and -month disease in cattle in Penn- 
 sylvania. Maryland, and Michigan during November. 1908. The origin 
 of the disease" was traced to 2i heifers which had been previously used 
 for the production of vaccine virus. 
 
 It is believed that vaccination produces the soil for the propagation 
 of smallpox. As vaccination is a septic poison, it would not be difficult 
 to maintain this position. 
 
 Turning- to the Brittanica. ninth edition, volume 24. page 29, we 
 read that Prussia was the best vaccinated coantry in Europe in 1871, 
 ret. during the" epidemic of that year its mortality was higher (69,839) 
 than any other northern State ; that the Bavarian contingent, which 
 was revaceinated without exception, had five times the death Tate 
 from smallpox than that of the Bavarian civil population: that in 
 Bavaria in 1871, of 30.742 cases of smallpox. 29,429 with 3,994 deaths 
 had been vaccinated: that at Bromley in 1881 there was a total of 
 43 eases, including 3 6 confluent, all vaccinated; that at Cologne in 
 1870 the first imraccinated person attacked by smallpox was the 
 one hundred and seventy-fourth in order of time ; at Bonn the same 
 rear the fortv-second ; and at Liegnity in 1871 the two hundred and 
 twenty-fifth. 'Take the recent cases in the "United States Navy, where 
 all are revaccinated, when the armored cruiser Washington was three 
 days out (Jan. 22, 1910) from Yokohama, smallpox broke out and 
 for three days treated as chickenpox. The vessel reached Honolulu 
 on the 28th 'with three cases, one of which proved fatal. Here the 
 ship was fumigated. The vessel left February 3, and by The 6th three 
 cases developed, and on the 14th arrived at Port Townsend with five 
 cases, where the patients were taken ashore, three of whom died. The 
 vessel was held in quarantine until the 22d. The vessel arrived at 
 San Francisco on March 4, reporting nine cases with four deaths. 
 
 Bv the advocates of the cult, Germany is pointed to with pride from 
 heing free from smallpox on account of her rigid laws for vaccination. 
 Let us see. During the week ending July 9, 1910, in the British 
 Parliament, a question was asked concerning a recent report of small- 
 pox in Germany. The Pught Hon. Sir John Burns, president of the 
 local Government board, replied that in Prussia 690 cases, with 107 
 deaths, had been notified. 
 
 With the imperfect record above set forth there is sufficient evidence 
 for us to believe with Lord Clifton that vaccination is " legal child 
 murder." or with others who declare it to be a " ghastly delusion." 
 
 Franklin, Ohio., October ZG, 1910. 
 
 Mr. President, tlie facts and conditions are so clearly stated 
 in this article and others that I have cited, that but little need 
 be said by me. The sentiment against enforced yaccination is 
 growing in volume and strength every day. It is supported 
 only by fear and confidence in medical opinions on the subject, 
 opinions actuated in the main by self-interest. Of course, there, 
 are many honest and conscientious people who believe in vac- 
 cination, and they are easily conyinced of the preventive effects 
 of other serum remedies. I venture to say, however, that there 
 are very few competent doctors who believe in any of these 
 remedies. 
 
 But, Mr. President, their inefficacy is not the worst of it. 
 If this were all. they would at least be harmless; but it has 
 been proved over and over again that they are worse than 
 harmless — they are dangerous to health and life. Thousands 
 of lives have been lost by the most violent and loathsome dis- 
 eases by the use of these remedies. That is clearly shown by 
 the communications I have just read. And the doctors are not 
 only doubtful of the new serum remedies that are coming into 
 use*, but they are fearful of their effects in causing and trans- 
 ferring other and new diseases. They already have a new dis- 
 ease, called the " serum disease." The Hartford Times, as far 
 back as 1908, had this to say on the subject, most of the facia 
 being taken from the Inter-State Medical Journal: 
 
 DOCTORS AltE WORRIED OVER SERUM DISEASES INJURIOUS SYMPTOMS 
 
 FOUND TO FOLLOW INJECTIONS OF ANTTTOXINS IN SOME CASES. 
 
 riiysicians are discussing an ailment to which the name "serum 
 disease "is now applied. The name is used to describe various eroups 
 41917—10969 
 
57 
 
 of symptoms occurring after hypodermic injections of sera used to 
 combat several acute diseases. The phenomena arising from the ad- 
 ministration of normal, antitoxic or bactericidal serum at first were 
 supposed to be harmless, but this has been disproved. 
 
 "Although manifest symptoms do not occur in more than one-third 
 of all cases," says Dr. E. W. Saunders, of St. Louis, in the current 
 issue of the Inter-State Medical Journal, " the cellular reaction to the 
 alien serum is probably present in every individual who receives an 
 injection, and the phenomena may be observed to a greater or less 
 degree if the proper tests are made." 
 
 Dr. Saunders offers some practical rules in regard to the use of the 
 various sera for the consideration of his fellow practitioners. He says : 
 " Curative sera are not tbe harmless substances we originally supposed. 
 Immunizing injections of serum should not be employed when isolation 
 will prevent the disease with a reasonable degiee of certainty and the 
 children can be watched. 
 
 " Serum should not be used in asthmatics or those suffering from 
 Grave's disease, or the lymphatic constitution, except in developed diph- 
 theria. The use of bactericidal sera of doubtful value should not be 
 encouraged without careful consideration of all the possible bad effects. 
 
 " If a second dose of serum must be given during the few weeks fol- 
 lowing a primary injection, small repeated doses axe preferahle to a 
 larsre "single dose. 
 
 "On the other hand, one large initial dose is probably less harmful 
 and far more effective than several doses given over several days. 
 
 "THE ST3IPTOMS. 
 
 " In some of the cases injected, varying from 10 to 40 per cent, after 
 a period of 5 to 20 days, the patient becomes restless, and may complain 
 of lassitude and pain in the limbs. This is soon followed by the serum 
 exanthem. which is often acompanied by a severe itching and burning. 
 The serum rash varies in character. Most often erythematous patches, 
 rose red in color, will be found covering various parts of the body. 
 Sometimes the eruption is distinctly scarlatiniform. Occasionally it 
 resembles measles. 
 
 "A very striking symptom is edema of the skin, which may be present 
 only in certain circumscribed spots or more rarely involve the whole 
 integument, giving the person a ghastly, bloated appearance. A very 
 serious form is the hemorrhagic type, in which hemorrhages occur in 
 the skin. Fortunately this is rare. 
 
 " Joint pains are frequently observed. One or more of the joints 
 may become very tender to touch and to movement. Muscular pains 
 are very common. Articular swelling may he present. The wrists 
 knees, hips, elbows, ankles, and shoulder are most frequently implicated. 
 
 " That the disease is a general disturbance is proved by the fact that 
 an elevation of temperature is frequently present. The fever may be 
 very high. Vomiting and diarrhea occur in a small portion of cases. 
 
 " In 1899, after repeated injections of diphtheria antitoxin in the 
 babies of the Bethesda Foundlings' Home, I had the opportunity to 
 observe in several cases the sensitizing effect of a previous injection. 
 
 " AVe found that many of the infants who had received' an im- 
 munizing dose six weeks previously showed a very marked supersensi- 
 bility to the second injection. The symptoms of serum disease, which 
 are usually delayed a week or more, came on within a few minutes and 
 with much greater violence. I reported these observations in the St. 
 Louis Courier of Medicine in 1899. Although the explanation given 
 then does not entirely harmo7iize with the present debated theories, the 
 occurrence of a supersensibility and the clinical symptoms were clearly 
 depicted. 
 
 " CONDITIONS OFTEN PEOTKACTED. 
 
 " The condition is sometimes remarkably protracted. Thus, in one 
 instance, in a little girl who received an injection of antidiphtheritie 
 serum four years previously, another injection of the so-called globulin 
 antitoxin produced violent symptoms in a few hours. Rosenan and 
 Anderson found the condition persisting for several months. It is 
 possible that this supersensitiveness may remain throughout life in 
 certain individuals, and that it may be transmitted to offspring, as is 
 the case in guinea pigs. 
 
 " The symptoms of this second reaction are very similar to those of 
 the primary disease but supervene very soon after the second injection, 
 sometimes within a few minutes. There may be a chill, convulsions, 
 and sudden high fever. The respiration becomes very rapid, tbe pulse 
 accelerated, and the patient shows great anxiety. In some cases a 
 severe dermatitis, with local pain around the site of the injection, ap- 
 pears. Bolton reported a case of local gangrene. 
 41917— 109G9 
 
58 
 
 "As far as I can learn no cases of death have occurred in human 
 beings by the repeated injections of horse serum, yet the severe symp- 
 toms which sometimes occur and the fact that gangrene and death 
 are so frequent in animals, convinces the clinician that antitoxic horse 
 serum is by no means a remedy which can be used carelessly or indis- 
 criminately. 
 
 "Another form of supersensitiveness occurs in certain individuals 
 who have not had a previous injection of antitoxin. Quite a number of 
 cases have been reported, and I have seen a number myself in which the 
 immediate serum reaction occurred, and yet the patient injected had 
 never before had a dose of horse serum. No explanation can be offered 
 for these eases at present except that of idiosyncrasy. 
 
 "All efforts to rid the curative sera of the toxic substance which 
 sensitizes have proved futile. Meule's observation that fresh sera have 
 a greater tendency to cause rashes than older sera has been refuted 
 experimentally by Rosenan. So far all theories offered to explain this 
 condition have met all the known facts." 
 
 The mistakes tlie doctors make in diagnosing cases of sup- 
 posed smallpox and other diseases would be ludicrous if tliey 
 were not so serious in their consecpiences. Pasadena, Cal., had 
 a conspicuous case of this kind. Dr. Stanley P. Black, health 
 officer of that city, was called to pass upon the case of two chil- 
 dren, pronounced their case smallpox, placarded the house, 
 established a quarantine, and ordered over 800 children, who 
 had not been successfully vaccinated, excluded from the schools. 
 The indignant parents of the excluded children demanded that 
 some other physician be called in to determine whether the 
 sick children really had the smallpox. But the health officer, 
 characteristic of his kind, refused to allow another doctor to 
 see them. An indignation meeting of citizens was called and 
 the doctor forced to allow another doctor to be called. The 
 result was that the children were found to be suffering from 
 poison oak. Then the health officer did the only sensible thing 
 he had done in the whole transaction. He resigned. 
 
 I could go on quoting from opinions of doctors and scientists 
 almost without number showing how useless vaccination is and 
 the lives that have been sacrificed by the use of vaccine matter, 
 but it would serve no useful purpose. The people will not think 
 for themselves. They rely upon the doctors and vaccination is 
 a rich source of revenue to them. They know no more about its 
 effects than do other people, but the " faith in the doctor and 
 his drugs and his remedies," according to Dr. Osier, is quite 
 enough. 
 
 But there is one other thing to which I call the attention of 
 the Senate. In the Public Health Reports of the Public Health 
 and Marine-Hospital Service, June 23, 1911, Asst. Surg. Gen. 
 John W. Trask has this to say on the subject of the probable 
 or possible effects of vaccination : 
 
 That the community is protected by vaccination may be true for 
 certain localities, but "that the protection thus afforded is general can 
 hardly be maintained. Japan as a nation is probably a.s well or better 
 protected by vaccination than is the United States, and yet in 1907-8 
 there was an outbreak of smallpox in Japan in which 19,101 cases 
 were reported with 6.273 deaths. Vaccination did not there modify 
 the type of the disease to that found in America. In that outbreak 
 among 5,215 smallpox patients 1,527 were found who had never been 
 vaccinated. This is interesting, as indicating a relatively small number 
 of unvaccinated individuals. The epidemic was apparently one of con- 
 siderable virulence, the general death rate per hundred being 42. 2o 
 among the cases in 1907 and 32.32 among those in 1908, while the 
 deaths among the unvaccinated were 09.4 per hundred cases. Kitasato 
 believes that the virulence of the disease varies, and that when it 
 reaches the high point attained in Japan during 1907-S individuals 
 who have been previously vaccinated, and even those who have previ- 
 ously had an attack, contract the disease. In this outbreak there were 
 '41917—10909 
 
59 
 
 242 cases in seven prefectures in which the patients had previously had 
 the disease. Of these, 57 died. 
 
 If the nonvirulence of the disease in this country is due to protection 
 by vaccination it would be expected that the mild cases would be found 
 only in those so protected. This may be assumed from the limited in- 
 formation available not to be the case. Records of the vaccination 
 history of all patients would undoubtedly add much to our knowledge of 
 the subject. 
 
 That the type of the disease as seen in the United States is due to 
 (he "protective value of vaccination is shown not to be true for certain 
 localities in which outbreaks of the virulent form of the disease have 
 been reported. These outbreaks have occurred at widely separated 
 points, extending from Virginia and South Carolina in 1900 to Mich- 
 igan, Oklahoma, Texas, and Oregon in 1910. The cases of the disease 
 reported in New York City in 1910 also had a high percentage of 
 deaths. These outbreaks showed a high virulence, the deaths being 
 at the rate of from 10.13 at Cleveland, Ohio, to 54.05 in Oklahoma 
 County, Okla., per hundred cases. 
 
 This comes from an official medical source. It shows two 
 things : ( 1 ) That the doctors do not know whether vaccination 
 prevents smallpox or not, and (2) that experience tends to 
 prove that it does not. This was a hard blow to the vaccina- 
 tion doctors. 
 
 But, Mr. President, although this report was printed less 
 than a year ago, a copy of it, containing this statement, can not 
 be had to-day. I understand that it has been reprinted with 
 this portion of it suppressed. I suppose Dr. Trask was duly 
 reprimanded for telling the truth in his report. I venture the 
 assertion that he was not a member of the American Medical 
 Association or he never would have fallen into the error of 
 discrediting a practice that brings so much money to the pro- 
 fession. With all the claims made for vaccination, with a large 
 part of the doctors its use never could have been maintained 
 without compulsory laws; and no such laws could ever be 
 passed without the aid of the doctors, and that aid would not 
 be given if it were not such an economic source of revenue to the 
 doctors. The law that compels its use is one of the worst laws 
 that good citizens who believe in liberty have cause to com- 
 plain of. 
 
 Mr. John Pitcairn has tbis to say on the subject in the Ladies' 
 Home Journal for May, 1910 : 
 
 Vaccination is the putting of an impure thing into the blood — a 
 virus or poison — often resulting in serious evil effects. In vogue for 
 more ihan 100 years, it has been received hy most persons without 
 question. But the time is passing when people will accept a medical 
 dogma on blind faith ; they now demand to know something about the 
 practices to which they are called on to submit ; and most insistent 
 of all should be the demand to know something of a practice which, 
 like vaccination, involves the risk of disease and of possible death. 
 ******* 
 
 But I need hardly appeal to statistics, which might be gathered from 
 every civilized country. Consult any mother having practical acquaint- 
 ance with the results of vaccination, as observed by herself, and you" 
 will rarely fail to hear something of its serious and lasting ill-effects. 
 
 Surely these facts and figures are enough to show that vaccination 
 involves serious risks, and to make it incumbent upon all, and espe- 
 cially on parents, to make some inquiry at least before they submit 
 either themselves or their children to these risks. 
 
 But some one may ask, if all this is true, why does vaccination con- 
 tinue? It continues, very largely, because it is enforced by law. Take 
 away legal compulsion and vaccination would not long survive. But it 
 has been enforced almost from its birth and has thus come to be 
 regarded as more or less a matter of course. In all modern history no 
 other medical operation has ever been legally enforced. But vaccina- 
 tion needed enforcement. Without compulsion it could never have 
 survived, for from the very day of its introduction it has been strenu- 
 ously opposed both by laymen and by members of the medical profession. 
 41917— 109C9 
 
GO 
 
 Eminent physicians, it is true, have supported it, but equally eminent 
 physicians, and also renowned bacteriologists and statisticians, have 
 condemned it as productive of the gravest injuries. 
 
 With respect to the clanger and. uncertainty, generally, of 
 these serum remedies the Journal of the American Medical As- 
 sociation of January, 1910, has this to say : 
 
 SERUM THERAPY IN A CONDITION OF CHAOS. 
 
 There is no class of remedial agents on which the physician should 
 be better informed and none, unfortunately, concerning which it is so 
 difficult to obtain a scientific and unbiased opinion. Only one of the 
 drugs of this class — diphtheria antitoxin — is recognized by the present 
 United States Pharmacopoeia ; and although some of the others (vaccine 
 virus, for instance) have been in use for some time, all are the subject 
 of such active investigation at the present time and so many new facts 
 concerning them are being discovered that it is extremely difficult for a 
 practitioner to keep abreast of these developments. 
 
 .Scientific and disinterested information concerning them is widely 
 scattered and often not easily accessible. The result has been that 
 physicians have become dependent to an unusual degree on the circulars 
 issued by manufacturing houses. Some of these circulars are almost 
 models of scientific accuracy ; others, unfortunately, are far from 
 accurate and the directions given for the use of the products are not 
 even safe. 
 
 And yet the National Government with all of its power is forc- 
 ing their use upon its unwilling citizens. 
 
 [At this point Mr. Wobks yielded the floor for the day.] 
 
 Tuesday, April 30, 1912. 
 
 ENFORCED PHYSICAL EXAMINATION OF SCHOOL CHILDREN. 
 
 Mr. WORKS. Mr. President, the doctors composing boards 
 of health are not content to leave it to the parents of school 
 children to determine whether children shall be examined by 
 doctors and nurses appointed by school boards to detect physical 
 defects or not. They have, in some of the States, procured laws 
 providing for enforced examinations, leaving no choice to the 
 parents, and will do so in every State if they can. What I have 
 said about the methods of the doctors will indicate what such 
 a license would mean. Some of the doctors thus employed are 
 honorable and conscientious men. Some of them, it may safely 
 be said, are not. And most of them are inexperienced and some 
 wholly incompetent. It has been said that what a doctor looks 
 for in the way of disease he generally finds. In these school ex- 
 aminations they have found an astonishing number of physical 
 defects that, in their estimation, call for surgical operations. 
 And generally when this is necessary the doctor who discovers 
 the fact gets the job. If he does not, some other doctor does. It 
 adds immensely to the practice and revenues of the profession. 
 It is a great temptation to make business and increase the prac- 
 tice that they say they have lost through " irregular practi- 
 tioners." 
 
 This effort to get possession of the schools by the doctors, to 
 the exclusion of the parents, has aroused very general indigna- 
 tion and protest. It is regarded as one more unwarranted effort 
 of the doctors to usurp all power in the matter of health regu- 
 lation and the treatment of disease. Compulsory examination 
 is the forerunner of compulsory treatment. This statement of 
 the conditions of things under such a law of compulsory exami- 
 nation in Boston is typical of all of them. 
 
 Children of the Boston schools, by a new regulation, are made to 
 
 undergo a physical examination which will necessitate the removal of 
 
 clothing. A storm of protests from many parents, as well as children, 
 
 was aroused yesterday when the work of examination of 800 girls of 
 
 41917— 100G9 
 
61 
 
 the Roxbury High School was nparly completed Two girls strongly 
 objected to the examination, but finally were persuaded to submit. 
 There was another protest from the residents of West Roxbury when 
 about GO girls were subjected to the examinations at West Roxbury 
 High School yesterday. One girl who objected was sent home to her 
 parents and told to consult the family physician. How her case came 
 out is not known. Although the statute requiring the examination has 
 existed since 1906, the examination has not been rigidly enforced ex- 
 cept in the primary schools, but this year it is to apply to all of the 
 grades. It is over the high-school and normal-school girls between 14 
 and IS years of age that objections are being made. The board of 
 health and the school committee both support the regulation as neces- 
 sary and essential in maintaining the health of the school children and 
 as a preventive to disease. The heart, lungs, and spice may be ex- 
 amined, and feet when necessary, 
 
 Mr. President, I can not stop now to enter upon any extended 
 argument on this question. It seems to me to be so obnoxiously 
 subversive of every sense of personal liberty and such an en- 
 croachment on the rights of parents to have control of their 
 children that it needs no discussion. 
 
 EILL IN VIOLATION OF EIGHTS OF THE STATES, 
 
 Mr. President, it is a conceded fact that within the States 
 health regulations are within the power and jurisdiction of the 
 State authorities, and it is an authority that is and should be 
 jealously guarded. Ostensibly this bill purports to confine the 
 activities of the Government in this respect to Federal terri- 
 tory and within Federal jurisdiction. If it does not, it would 
 at once be declared unconstitutional. But one of the prime ob- 
 jects of the bill is to extend this power to every State in the 
 Union, and, if it is passed, the powers granted by it will be 
 used for that very purpose. That is the very thing the doctors 
 are most desirous of bringing about. The bill is very ingen- 
 iously drawn to accomplish this result. It provides : 
 
 It shall be the duty of the bureau of health to collect and disseminate 
 information relating to the public health and to enforce the. observance 
 of all regulations and laws of the United States relating to the public 
 health. 
 
 This is as broad and comprehensive as language can well 
 make it. It is attempted or pretended to be modified by a pro- 
 viso to the effect that this shall not authorize the bureau of 
 health to — 
 
 exercise, or attempt to exercise, without express invitation from the 
 chief executive or other proper authority of the State, any function 
 belonging exclusively to such State. 
 
 Under this clause any board of health of any State composed 
 of the very doctors who are interested in extending the power 
 of this health bureau to the farthest limit may extend this in- 
 vitation. These two interested parties will not be long in ex- 
 tending the activities of this bureau into the States ; and, un- 
 fortunately, if it were left wholly to the executive authority of 
 the State he would, as a rule, leave it to the health authorities 
 and the result would be the same. The author of the bill was 
 not quite satisfied, however, with this convenient opportunity 
 to invade the States. The director of health is authorized, in 
 his discretion, to appoint an advisory board of not more than 
 seven members, who may, of course, be doctors of the regular 
 school in as many States " to confer with him * * * con- 
 cerning the health of the people," who shall hold office for a 
 term of seven years. 
 41017—10969 
 
62 
 
 This makes a very close and satisfactory connection between 
 State and Nation, and should be entirely satisfactory to the 
 doctors. 
 
 But, Mr. President, the bill does not stop there. It gives the 
 director of health power to request the health authorities of all 
 the States to send delegates— 
 
 to confer with him or his duly appointed representatives and with each 
 other at such time and place as he may designate concerning any par- 
 ticular matter or matters relating to the public health. 
 
 Not only so, but he is authorized by the provisions of the bill 
 to call a health conference of all the States, and compelled to 
 do so upon the petition of the health authorities of five States 
 and Territories. 
 
 A more ingenious attempt to evade the Constitution and en- 
 croach upon the province of the States in one of their most 
 vital and sacred rights has never been attempted. The obvious 
 purpose is to make the head of this bureau the autocratic power 
 that is to control the health activities of the whole country. 
 All he needs is the assent and cooperation of the doctors at the 
 head of the health boards of the several States, and as that is 
 just what they all want and are striving to obtain by this bill,' 
 it may be regarded as done as soon as the bill becomes a law. 
 
 I commend these considerations to the careful attention of 
 the Senate. 
 
 RESTRICTIVE LAWS IX VIOLATION OF THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 Mr. President, I come now to the consideration of a purely 
 legal question presented by the enactment and enforcement of 
 the restrictive laws that I have endeavored to bring to the at- 
 tention of the Senate, including the bill under consideration, 
 which is a part of the scheme to deprive certain people of this 
 country of the right to heal disease and ameliorate human 
 suffering according to their conscientious convictions; in case 
 of some of them, according to their religious views of right and 
 duty. 
 
 In the consideration of this question I shall be forced to give 
 attention particularly to the rights of Christian Scientists in 
 this respect, because, whether rightly or wrongly, they believe 
 it to be a sacred religious duty to heal the sick by spiritual 
 means, as they understand the scriptural command to heal the 
 sick, and the mode of healing pointed out by the Master in His 
 teachings and example. 
 
 This being their attitude, founded upon sincere and earnest 
 conviction, the question at once arises whether a law that de- 
 nies or abridges their right to heal in their own way, or to 
 receive such ministration as they feel to be the proper one, is 
 not a violation of the express provisions of the Constitution of 
 the United States designed to protect the people of the country 
 in the observance of their religious rights. In the settlement 
 of this momentous question we must consider the case of both 
 the one who administers to the sick and the one who seeks and 
 desires this mode of treatmeut. Is the practitioner of this 
 mode of healing, in which he has supreme faith and confidence, 
 to be denied the right to exercise his right to practice? Again, 
 is the man who has equal trust and confidence in this remedy 
 to be denied his right to resort to it for help? If so, why? 
 41917—10909 
 
63 
 
 Only because some other people do not believe in it. This is 
 the sole foundation for any and every effort that has been made 
 to prevent or abridge such practice unless we take into account 
 the selfish desire of those practicing other modes of healing to 
 uphold themselves by the prohibition of this mode of healing, 
 
 Mr. President, this is the whole question. Not whether the 
 Christian Scientist is a conscientious Christian man, honestly 
 and trustfully depending upon Divine power for his healing, 
 but whether some one else, who may represent, for the time 
 being, the power of government in the enactment, construction, 
 and enforcement of the laws, does not agree with him, but does 
 believe with equal honesty and good faith that he is wrong in 
 his beliefs and that the mode of healing upon which he relies 
 is not effective, and that his pretensions are false and un- 
 founded. 
 
 Why, Mr. President, this very conflict of views on a religious 
 question, that might and really is being used as a ground for 
 persecution as I have clearly shown, brings us within the very 
 spirit and purpose of the Constitution. The great Catholic 
 Church has its creeds and its religious convictions, with which 
 other people of different religious views do not agree, and which 
 some intolerant people would suppress by law if the Constitution 
 and the courts did not stand for freedom of religious thought 
 and observance. So it is with the powerful Protestant religious 
 denominations. 
 
 But all of these Christian bodies believe in Divine healing. 
 They pray to Almighty God for the healing of their sick, and 
 believe in the efficacy of such prayer. And yet some people be- 
 longing to these religious bodies, I hope not many of them, deny 
 to the Christian Scientist the right to heal by prayer, and de- 
 nounce his pretensions to heal through the power of the same 
 God that they serve and trust as both false and ungodly. 
 
 There is this difference between the prayer of other Christian 
 people and Christian Scientists: Their prayer is an appeal to 
 God for intervention in the particular case. They attempt to 
 move God to heal the individual. The Christian Scientist be- 
 lieves that God is unchangeable and that He can not be moved 
 by prayer to do or not to do a desired thing, but that He has 
 already and for all time given man all good, which is always 
 there for him when he conforms to His laws and does His 
 bidding. Therefore the Christian Scientist prays not to change 
 God or to induce Him to act, but to change man, regenerate him, 
 and bring him into harmony with the Divine law that must 
 restore harmony and right conditions in him, which means nec- 
 essarily restoration to natural and harmonious conditions. 
 
 It is the belief of Christian Scientists that the purpose of 
 prayer and all Christian effort is to regenerate man and bring 
 him into reconciliation and harmony with the Divine Being, 
 and that this effort of reconciliation and regeneration by prayer 
 is the true, the only true, means of healing the sick. 
 
 Jesus of Nazareth was persecuted and finally crucified for 
 preaching the gospel and practicing his religious belief, by 
 healing the sick. To do the same to-day in the twentieth 
 century in the great State of New York, if he were here, would 
 make him a criminal, subject to fine and imprisonment by the 
 laws of that State. Only a few days ago a Christian Scientist 
 41917—10969 
 
C4 
 
 was convicted and punished for healing the sick as he believed 
 in the way and by the same power and principle that Jesus 
 healed. 
 
 Now, Mr. President, who is to determine which of these dif- 
 ferent beliefs sincerely entertained is right and which is wrong. 
 Who is authorized or who will be permitted under our Constitu- 
 tion to declare one of these beliefs and the exercise of it in the 
 healing of the sick a crime? 
 
 This effort to enact and enforce such laws, I am glad to say, 
 is not being made by the people of other church denominations 
 or by persons entertaining different religious beliefs. I think 
 I have shown that it comes from the doctors whose emoluments 
 are derived from the effort to heal disease in their way, not for 
 religious but for purely material and selfish reasons. 
 
 The Constitution of the United States provides, amendments 
 to the Constitution, Article I : 
 
 Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or 
 prohibiting the free exercise thereof. 
 
 This, of course, is a prohibition against action by the Federal 
 Government. Article XIV, section 1, provides: 
 
 No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the 
 privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. 
 
 There can be no higher or more sacred privilege than that of 
 exercising one's religion, and every citizen is entitled to protec- 
 tion from any law that would denv or abridge that right. 
 
 In Reynolds v. United States (98 U. S., 145, 182), the court 
 said: 
 
 Congress can not pass a law for the government of the Territories 
 which shall prohibit the free exercise of religion. The first amendment 
 to the Constitution expressly forbids such legislation. Religious freedom 
 is guaranteed everywhere throughout the United States, so far as con- 
 gressional interference is concerned. 
 
 But in that case the court distinguished between mere re- 
 ligious opinions and beliefs and overt acts made criminal by 
 the laws of the land. The court, after referring to an early 
 statute of Virginia on the subject, uses this further language : 
 
 In the preamble of this act (12 Hening's Stat., 84) religious freedom 
 is defined: and after a recital "that to suffer the civil magistrate >to 
 intrude his powers into the field of opinion, and to restrain the pro- 
 fession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency, 
 is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty," it 
 is declared " that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil 
 government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into 
 overt acts against peace and good order." In these two sentences is 
 found the true distinction between what properly belongs to the church 
 and what to the State. 
 
 The effect of the decision seems to be that religious belief 
 can not be punished; but when, under the guise of exercising 
 one's religion, an overt act " against peace and good order " is 
 committed the overt act is punishable by the State. 
 
 This was a case where the defendant was prosecuted for 
 polj-gamy, and he defended on the ground that polygamy 
 was allowed and recognized by his church. 
 
 I shall show, I think, to the entire satisfaction of the Senate 
 that the healing of the sick as an act of religious duty can not 
 be regarded as an overt act "against peace and good order," 
 or otherwise in violation of law or public policy. But, looking 
 at it in the light of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitu- 
 tion, and treating it as a question of the abridgment of the 
 41017—10009 
 
65 
 
 privileges of the citizen, the case of American School of Mag- 
 netic Healing v. McAnnulty is interesting and instructive. The 
 case was one where the Postmaster General had excluded from 
 the mails certain printed matter advertising the plaintiff as a 
 magnetic healer. After pointing out that one means of healing 
 was believed in by some and different means by others, and 
 that no one could determine how far one was right and the 
 other was wrong, the court said : 
 
 Again, there are many persons who do not believe in the homeo- 
 pathic school of medicine, and who think that such doctrine, if prac- 
 ticed precisely upon the lines set forth by its originator, is absolutely 
 inefficacious in the treatment of diseases. Are homeopathic physicians 
 subject to be proceeded against under these statutes and liable at the 
 discretion of the Postmaster General, upon evidence satisfactory to 
 him. to be found guilty of obtaining money under false pretenses and 
 their letters stamped as fraudulent and the money contained therein 
 as payment for their professional services sent back to the writers of 
 the letters? And, turning the question around, can physicians of what 
 is called the "old school" be thus proceeded against? Both of these 
 different schools of medicine have their followers, and many who be- 
 lieve in the one will pronounce the other wholly devoid of merit. But 
 there is no precise standard by which to measure the claims of either, 
 for people do recover who are treated according to the one or the other 
 school. And so it is said, Do people recover who are treated under this 
 mental theory? By reason of it? That can uot be averred as matter of 
 fact. Many think they do Others are of the contrary opinion. Is 
 the Postmaster General to decide the question under these statutes? 
 
 The laws under consideration, without exception, place it 
 within the power of a board of health composed of medical 
 practitioners, usually of one school of medicine, to determine 
 who shall practice healing. The question of their right does 
 not depend in the least upon their knowledge of medicine or 
 medical practice, because they make no claim to any such 
 knowledge. Manifestly a medical practitioner can not pass 
 upon their fitness to heal in their way, because he is as ignorant 
 of their way of healing as they are of his. Such laws, there- 
 fore, in practical effect, declare that no one but a medical prac- 
 titioner shall be allowed to practice the art of healing. Whether 
 the act says so or not, that is its effect, and known and in- 
 tended to be so. It is a denial of the right to practice except 
 in one way. All other modes of healing are prohibited, and 
 the right of the citizen to resort to any other is denied. As a 
 result, there can be no advance in knowledge in other modes 
 of healing that is not a violation of law. 
 
 Mr. President, when a question like this confronts us the 
 people of this country had better look to their liberties. Prof. 
 James, from whose address I have already quoted, opposed one 
 of such bills because it was " a movement in favor of igno- 
 rance." He says, with emphasis, that — - 
 
 The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is not a medical body, has no 
 right to a medical opinion, and should not dare to take sides in medical 
 controversies. 
 
 Truer words were never spoken, and they are just as true of 
 the Federal Government as they are of the State of Massachu- 
 setts. 
 
 This should be enough to impel the lawmaking power to hold 
 its hand. But if it does not, then the courts must determine 
 whether such a law. affecting the rights of the citizen in a matter 
 of the highest import, affecting the most sacred of his affairs, 
 can be enacted and enforced under a Constitution like ours 
 under the fundamental law of a Nation of freemen, 
 •i 1 1 7— 1 0969 5 
 
66 
 
 The case of State v. Biggs (133 N. C.) is a most interesting 
 and instructive one on this subject. The defendant was prose- 
 cuted under one of the acts that I have described making it 
 a crime to practice medicine without a license and specifically 
 defining the meaning of the words " practicing medicine." The 
 opinion was delivered by Mr. Justice Clarke, of the supreme 
 court of that State. I take the liberty of quoting portions of 
 the opinion : 
 
 What is " the practice of medicine and surgery " is as well under- 
 stood, and its limits, as the practice of dentistry. The courts hare 
 also held that of the many schools of " medicine and surgery " the 
 legislature could not prescribe that any one was orthodox and the other 
 heterodox, but that those professing the different systems — " allo- 
 pathic," "homeopathic," " Thompsonian," and the like — should be ex- 
 amined upon a course such as is taught in the best colleges of that 
 school of practice, but that it is not essential that a member of each 
 or of any special school should be upon the board of examiners. 
 ******* 
 
 * * • Under the guise of " construction " of those well-under- 
 stood terms the " practice of medicine and surgery " the act essays to 
 provide that the expression " practice of medicine and surgery " shall 
 Be construed to mean the management " for fee or reward " of any case 
 of disease, physical or mental, real or imaginary, with or without drugs, 
 surgical operation, surgical or mechanical appliances, or by any other 
 method whatsoever ; that is, the practice of surgery and medicine shall 
 mean practice without surgery or medicine if a fee is charged. If no 
 fee is charged, then the words surgery and medicine " drop back to their 
 usual and ordinary meaning, as by long usage known and accustomed. 
 Where, then, is the protection to the public if such treatment is valid 
 when done without fee or reward? Yet unless the act confers and is 
 intended solely to confer protection upon the public it is invalid. The 
 legislature can not forbid one man to practice a calling or profession 
 for the benefit or profit of another. 
 
 ****** * 
 
 * * * Then It is forbidden to relieve a case of suffering, " physical 
 or mental," in any method unless one is an M. D. It is not 
 even admissible to " minister to a mind diseased " in any method or 
 even dissipate an attack of the " blues " without that label duly cer- 
 tified. Is not this creating a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies, 
 that diseases shall not be cured or alleviated, whether real or imagi- 
 nary, mental or physical, though without medicine or surgery, " if for 
 a fee," unless one has undergone an examination on " anatomy, physi- 
 ology, surgery, pathology, medical hygiene, chemistry, pharmacy, 
 materia medica, therapeutics, obstetrics, and the practice of medicine " ? 
 
 ******* 
 
 * * * rp^g p U t,ii c have a right to know that those holding them- 
 selves out as members of that ancient and honorable profession are 
 competent and duly licensed as such. The legislature can exert its 
 police power to that end, because it is a profession whose practice re- 
 quires the highest skill and learning. But there are methods of treat- 
 ment which do not require much skill and learning, if any. Patients 
 have a right to use such methods if they wish, and the attempt to re- 
 quire an examination of the character above recited for the application 
 of such treatment is not warranted by any legitimate exercise of the 
 police power. * * * 
 
 The term " practice of medicine and surgery " embraces probably the 
 larger, and certainly by far the most profitable, part of the " treatment 
 of diseases," but is not coextensive with the latter term, and can not 
 be made so unless " surgery and medicine " are adopted as the State 
 system of treatment, a monopoly, and all other methods are made indict- 
 able. On the other hand, the State Medical Society would hardly wish 
 to broaden out so as to take in all methods of treatment of disease, for 
 this would be to take in practitioners and practices which they would 
 not wish to recognize. All the law so far has done or can do is to 
 require that those practicing on the sick with knife and drugs shall be 
 examined and found competent by those " of like faith and order." 
 
 Dr. vJiver Wendell Holmes, in an address before the Medical So- 
 ciety in Massachusetts, said : " If the whole materia medica was 
 sunk to the bottom of the sea it would be all the better for mankind 
 and all the worse for the fishes." An eminent medical authority iu 
 
 41017— 10969 
 
67 
 
 this State has said that out of -4 serious eases of disease 3 could not 
 be cured by the best remedies, 3 others might be benefited, and the rest 
 would get well anyway. Stronger statements could be cited from the 
 most eminent medical authorities the world has known. Medicine is an 
 experimental, not an exact, science. All the law can do is to regulate 
 and safeguard the use of powerful and dangerous remedies, like the 
 knife and drugs, but it can not forbid dispensing with them. When 
 the Master, who was Himself called the Good Physician, was told that 
 other than His followers were casting out devils and curing diseases, 
 He said, " Forbid them not." 
 
 The case last referred to did not relate to the religious side 
 of the question. The defendaut made no claim that gave rise 
 to any such questiou. But the courts of this country have jeal- 
 ously guarded the religious rights and opinions of the people as 
 ■within the protection of the Constitution. The case of the 
 Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States (143 U. S., 457), 
 while not involving a constitutional question, is an interesting 
 one as showing the attitude of the highest court in the country 
 in matters of religion. 
 
 The plaintiff in the case had, by contract, employed a for- 
 eigner as its minister or rector. The question was whether 
 such a contract was in violation of the statute forbidding the 
 •' importation and migration of foreigners and aliens under con- 
 tract or agreement to perform labor in the United States." It 
 was conceded that the case was within the letter of the statute, 
 but it was held not to be within its spirit. The court, looking 
 to the title of the act and the evils evidently intended to be met 
 by it, decided that its object was to " stay the influx of cheap 
 unskilled labor " into this country. 
 
 In commenting upon this situation Mr. Justice Brewer had 
 this to say on the religious phase of the question : 
 
 But beyond all these matters no purpose of action against religion 
 can be imputed to any legislation, State or national, because this is a 
 religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of this 
 continent to the present hour there is a single voice making this 
 affirmation. 
 
 And, after referring to numerous historical instances showing 
 the reliance of our people upon Divine guidance and support in 
 dealing with grave problems and important events, the learned 
 justice says further: 
 
 Coming nearer to the present time, the Declaration of Independence 
 recognizes the presence of the Divine in human affairs in these words : 
 " We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created 
 equal ; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable 
 rights ; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- 
 ness." " We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of 
 America, in general Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge 
 of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by 
 authority of the good people of these Colonies, solemnly publish and 
 declare," etc. "And for the support of this declaration, with a firm 
 reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to 
 each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." 
 
 If we examine the constitutions of the various States we find in 
 them a constant recognition of religious obligations. Every constitu- 
 tion of every one of the 44 States contains language which either 
 directly or by clear implication recognizes a profound reverence for re- 
 ligion and an assumption that its influence in all human affairs is 
 essential to the well-being of the community. This recognition may be 
 in the preamble, such as is found in the constitution of Illinois, 3 870: 
 '■ We, the people of the State of Illinois, grateful to Almighty God for 
 the civil, political, and religious liberty which He hath so long per- 
 mitted us to enjoy, and looking to Him for a blessing upon our en- 
 deavors to secure and transmit the same unimpaired to succeeding 
 generations," etc. 
 41917—10969 
 
68 
 
 He proceeds at length to quote from the constitutions of the 
 various States, showing their intention to encourage free and 
 unrestrained reliance upon religion in the affairs of men. Then 
 he says : 
 
 There is no dissonance in these declarations. There is a universal 
 language pervading them all, having one meaning ; they affirm and 
 reaffirm that this is a religious Nation. These are not individual say- 
 ings, declarations of private persons; they are organic utterances; they 
 5 speak the voice of the entire people. While, because of a general rec- 
 ognition of this truth, the question has seldom been presented to the 
 courts, yet we find that in Updegraph v. The Commonwealth (11 S. & 
 R., 394, 400) it was decided that " Christianity, general Christianity, 
 is, and always has been, a part of the common law of Pennsylvania ; 
 * * * not Christianity with an established church, and tithes, and 
 spiritual courts, but Christianity with liberty of conscience to all 
 men." And in The People v. Ruggles (8 Johns, 290, 294, 295) Chan- 
 cellor Kent, the great commentator on American law, speaking as 
 chief justice of the Supreme Court of New York, said : " The people of 
 this State, in common with the people of this country, profess the gen- 
 eral doctrines of Christian it y as the rule of their faith and practice ; 
 and to scandalize the author of these doctrines is not only, in a reli- 
 gious point of view, extremely impious, but even in respect to the 
 obligations due to society is a gross violation of decency and good 
 order. * * * The free, equal, and undisturbed enjoyment of reli- 
 gious opinion, whatever it may be, and free and decent discussions on 
 any religious subject is granted and secured ; but to revile, with mali- 
 cious and blasphemous contempt, the religion professed by almost the 
 whole community is an abuse of that right. Nor are we bound by any 
 expressions in the Constitution, as some have strangely supposed, 
 either not to punish at all or to punish indiscriminately the like at- 
 tacks upon the religion of Mahomet or of the Grand Lama, and for this 
 plain reason, that the case assumes that we are a Christian people, 
 and the morality of the country is deeply ingrafted upon Christianity 
 and not upon the doctrines or worship of those impostors." And in 
 the famous case of Vidal v. Girard's Executors (2 How., 127, 198) this 
 court, while sustaining the will of Mr. Girard, with its provision for 
 the creation of a college into which no minister should be permitted to 
 enter, observed : " It is also said, and truly, that the Christian religion 
 is a part of the common law of Pennsylvania." 
 
 Mr. Tiedeman, in his work, State and Federal Control of 
 Persons and Property, says : 
 
 The complete abrogation of all State interference in matters of religion 
 Is of slow growth and can only be attained with the growth of public 
 opinion. 
 
 The one great trouble is that so many sects or churches believe 
 that theirs is the only religion and that every claim of religious 
 belief that conflicts with theirs is un-Christian and no religion 
 at all. It is this spirit and the intolerance that springs from 
 it that stands in the way of every change of religious belief or 
 the establishment of any new or reform movement of a religious 
 character. That is just what the Christian Scientists are com- 
 bating to-day. While they agree with the orthodox churches 
 in all the essentials of the Christian religion, they are denounced 
 as an ungodly people because they go further than the old 
 churches in attempting to obey the whole command : " Preach 
 the gospel and heal the sick." 
 
 Tbat they believe in all the essentials of the Christian re- 
 ligion is fully shown by the tenets of the church, as follows : 
 
 1. As adherents of Truth, wo take the inspired Word of the Bible as 
 our sufficient guide to eternal Life. 
 
 2. We acknowledge and adore one supreme and infinite God. We 
 acknowledge His Son, one Christ ; the Holy Ghost or divine Comforter ; 
 and man in God's image anQ likeness. 
 
 3. We acknowledge God's forgiveness of sin in the destruction of sin 
 and the spiritual understanding that casts out evil as unreal. But the 
 belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts. 
 
 4. We acknowledge .Tesus's atonement as the evidence of divine, effi- 
 cacious Love, unfolding man's unity with God through Christ Jesus the 
 
 41917— 109C9 
 
69 
 
 Way-shower ; and we acknowledge that man is saved through Christ, 
 through Truth, Life, and Love, as demonstrated by the Galilean Prophet 
 in healing the sick and overcoming sin and death. 
 
 5. We acknowledge that the crucifixion of Jesus and His resurrec- 
 tion served to uplift faith, to understand eternal Life, even the allness 
 of Soul, Spirit, and the nothingness of matter. 
 
 6. And we solemnly promise to watch and pray for that Mind to be 
 in us which was also in Christ Jesus : to do unto others as we would 
 have them do unto us ; and to be merciful, just, and pure. 
 
 Believing, as they do, that the healing of disease is a Christian 
 duty imposed upon them by the command of the Master, a law 
 that forbids it or abridges their right and privilege to heal the 
 sick is a plain violation of both of the constitutional inhibitions 
 above mentioned. 
 
 Mr. Tiedeman says further on this subject : 
 
 Sec. 63. Police regulation of religion — constitutional restrictions : If 
 there were no provisions in the American Constitution especially appli- 
 cable to the matter of police regulation of religion, the considerations 
 which would deny to the State the control and prevention of vice would 
 also constitute insuperable objections to State interference in matters 
 of religion. But the rivalry and contention of the religious sects not 
 only demanded constitutional prohibition of the interference of the 
 National Government, but gave rise to the incorporation of like prohi- 
 bitions in the various State constitutions. The exact phraseology 
 varies with each constitution, but the practical effect is believed in the 
 main to be the same in all of them. These provisions not only pro- 
 hibit all church establishments, but also guarantee to each individual 
 the right to worship God in his own way, and to give free expression 
 to his religious views. The prohibition of a religious establishment not 
 only prevents the establishment of a distinctively State church, but 
 likewise prohibits all preferential treatment of the sects in the bestowal 
 of State patronage or aid. A law is unconstitutional which gives to 
 one or more religious sects a privilege that is not enjoyed equally by 
 all. " Whatever establishes a distinction against one class or sect is, 
 to the extent to which the distinction operates unfavorably, a persecu- 
 tion, and if based on religious grounds a religious persecution. The ex- 
 tent of the discrimination is not material to the principle, it is enough 
 that it creates an inequality of right or privilege." 
 
 And the reasons that brought about this constitutional inhibi- 
 tion against interference with religious belief and observance is 
 thus clearly pointed out by the same author : 
 
 * * * Most of the immigrants to American colonies were refugees 
 from religious oppression, driven to the wilds of America in order to 
 worship the God of the universe according to the dictates of their 
 conscience. The Puritans of New England, the Quakers of Pennsyl- 
 vania, the English Catholics of Maryland, and the Huguenots of the 
 Carolinas sought on this continent that religious liberty which was not 
 to be found in Europe. I should not say " religious liberty," for that 
 is not what they sought. They desired only to be freed from the re- 
 straint of an intolerant and imposing majority. They desired only to 
 settle in a country where the adherents of their peculiar creed could 
 control the affairs of state. Notwithstanding their sad experience in 
 the Old World, when they settled in America they became as intolei^ant 
 of dissenters from the faith of the majority as their enemies had been 
 toward them. 
 
 Mr. President, I need not, in a body like this, consume time in 
 discussing fundamental questions affecting the liberty and free- 
 dom of the individual and the necessary restraints imposed upon 
 him because of his association with others, composing civil or 
 governmental organizations. But the claim of right to restrain 
 such liberties for the good of the community or the public has 
 given rise to many problems and has unjustly deprived many of 
 their liberties. The police power, so called, is sometimes neces- 
 sary for the protection of the pttblic, but it has quite as fre- 
 quently been made the engine of oppression to the destruction, 
 without just cause, of the most sacred rights of the individual 
 41917—10909 
 
TO 
 
 citizen. Generally the courts stand in the way of the unlawful 
 use of this power, but the extent to which it has been enforced 
 by the courts at times has been most alarming. 
 
 There is no case, perhaps, in which an unlawful and oppressive 
 use of this great power has occurred to a greater extent than 
 in the cases I am now considering. The doctors assume, and are 
 able to make lawmakers believe, that the effort to heal disease 
 in any way but theirs is against public policy and should, as a 
 police regulation, be suppressed, by law. That is the ground 
 upon which all of the restrictive laws that I have been discuss- 
 ing are attempted to be sustained. 
 
 Unfortunately such laws are neither enacted nor construed by 
 the courts from knowledge or upon evidence proving the ineffi- 
 cacy of the mode of healing sought to be prevented. More 
 unfortunately still, in the minds of many the question resolves 
 itself into a religious one that in the intolerant religious mind 
 is controlled neither by reason nor justice. With such, if a 
 thousand respectable and reliable people should testify to their 
 healing through such means they would not be credited as 
 against one competent medical practitioner who should say 
 that disease could not be cured that way, or the word of one 
 theologian who should insist that the attempt to heal in any 
 such way is un-Christian and ungodly. 
 
 I hope the Senate of the United States will be actuated by a 
 higher and broader sense of the rights and liberties of the citi- 
 zen and judge the question by the rules of right, justice, and 
 reason. 
 
 Judge Cooley, In his admirable work on Constitutional Limi- 
 tations, thus defines the police power of a State : 
 
 The police of a State, in a comprehensive sense, embraces its whole 
 system of internal regulation, by which the State seeks not only to pre- 
 serve the public order and to prevent offenses against the State, but 
 also to establish for the intercourse of citizens with citizens those rules 
 of good manners and good neighborhood which are calculated to prevent 
 a conflict of rights, and to insure to each the uninterrupted enjoyment 
 of his own so far as is reasonably consistent with a like enjoyment of 
 rights by others. 
 
 Of course the exercise of this power usually arises in respect 
 of the use of property. But it does present itself upon the ques- 
 tion of religious liberty. In speaking of the constitutional inhi- 
 bition against laws affecting religious beliefs and observance, 
 Judge Cooley says further: 
 
 Those things which are not lawful under any of the American con- 
 stitutions may be stated thus : 
 
 1. Any law respecting an establishment of religion. The legislatures 
 have not been left at liberty to effect a union of church and state, or 
 to establish preferences by law in favor of any one religious persuasion 
 or mode of worship. There is not complete religious liberty where any 
 one sect is favored by the State and given an advantage by law over 
 other sects. Whatever establishes a distinction against one class or 
 sect is, to the extent to which the distinction operates unfavorably, a 
 persecution ; and if based on religious grounds, a religious persecution. 
 The extent of the discrimination is not material to the principle ; it is 
 enough that it creates an inequality of right or privilege. * * * 
 
 4. "Restraints upon the free.exercise of religion according to the dictates 
 of the conscience. No external authority is to place itself !>etween the 
 finite being and the infinite when the former is seeking to render the 
 homage that is due, and in a mode which commends itself to his con- 
 science and judgment as being suitable for him to render, and acceptable 
 to its object. 
 
 41917— 100G9 
 
71 
 
 5. Restraints upon the expression of religious belief. An earnest be- 
 liever usually regards it as his duty to propagate his opinions, and to 
 bring others to his views. To deprive him of this right is to take from 
 him the power to perform what he considers a most sacred obligation. 
 
 Mr. Fremiti, in his work on Police Power, in speaking under sx 
 subhead entitled " Restraint of religious activity in bebalf of 
 the public welfare,'' has this to say : 
 
 There are two kinds of legislation that would fall under this head- 
 measures for the repression of practices deemed disorderly or danger- 
 ous and the regulation of religious societies, chiefly with reference to 
 their property rights. This legislation . will also be considered sepa- 
 rately. 
 
 The essence and value of the constitutional guaranty lies in two 
 points : First, that religious belief as such and its peaceful and orderly 
 manifestation in worship and precept may not be treated as a menace 
 to the peace and welfare of the community or as a possible cause of 
 disorder; and, second, that, whatever restraint is placed upon religious 
 activity, through rules of property or otherwise, must be applied to all 
 denominations alike in order to avoid the preference and discrimination 
 which the constitutions forbid. 
 
 Mr. Presideut, it will be found that the police power can not 
 be invoked to restrain religious belief or action except where 
 the acts committed in the name of religion are in some way 
 a menace to the peace and welfare of the community or, as is 
 said in Reynolds v. United States, already referred to, " against 
 peace and good order." 
 
 In Ex parte Jentzseh (112 Cal., 468), the Supreme Court of 
 California, in passing upon a law of that State closing barber 
 shops on Sunday, has this to say: 
 
 Upon the question thus presented of the proper limits of the police 
 power, much might be written, and much, indeed, will have to be 
 written, ere .iust bounds are set to its exercise ; but, in this case, 
 neither time permits nor necessity demands the consideration. Still, 
 it may be suggested, in passing, that our Government was not de- 
 signed to be paternal in form. We are a self-governing people, and 
 our just pride is that our laws are made by us as well as for us. 
 Every individual citizen is to be allowed so much liberty as may exist 
 without impairment of the equal rights of his fellows. Our institu- 
 tions are founded upon the conviction that we are not only capable 
 of self-government as a community but, what is the logical necessity, 
 that we are capable to a great extent of individual self-government. 
 If this conviction shall prove ill founded we have built our house upon 
 sand. The spirit of a system such as ours is therefore at total variance 
 with that which, more or less veiled, still shows in the paternalism 
 of other nations. It may be injurious to health to eat bread before 
 it is 21 hours old, yet it would strike us with surprise to see the legis- 
 lature making a crime of the sale of fresh bread. We look with dis- 
 favor upon such legislation as we do upon the enactment of sumptuary 
 laws. We do not even punish a man for his vices unless they be 
 practiced openly, so as to lead to the spread of corruption or to 
 breaches of the peace or to public scandal. In brief, we give to the 
 individual the utmost possible amount of personal liberty, and, with 
 that guaranteed him, he is treated as a person of responsible judg- 
 ment, not as a child in his nonage, and is left free to work out his 
 destiny as impulse, education, training, heredity, and environment 
 direct him. 
 
 So, while the police power is one whose proper use makes most 
 potently for good, in its undefined scope and inordinate exercise lurks 
 no small danger to the Republic, for the difficulty which is experienced 
 in defining its just limits and bounds affords a temptation to the legis- 
 lature to encroach upon the rights of citizens with experimental laws, 
 none the less dangerous because well meant. 
 
 There are cases in which the true distinction is clearly made 
 between the proper exercise of religious duties, according to 
 one's conscience, and the commission of unlawful acts under the 
 guise of religious beliefs. It must be conceded that no one school 
 should be allowed to commit a crime or any act against peace, 
 41917—10069 
 
72 
 
 good order, or morals, and then justify himself nnder the claim 
 that the act was in accordance with his religious beliefs. 
 
 This distinction is clearly drawn in Davis v. Beason (133 
 T;. S., 333, 342), where the Supreme Court of the United States, 
 through Mr. Justice Field, made this clear and convincing state- 
 ment of the rule on the subject : 
 
 Tbe term " religion " has reference to one's views of his relations to 
 his Creator, and to the obligations they impose of reverence for his 
 being and character, and of obedience to His will. It is often con- 
 founded with the eultus, or form of worship of a particular sect, but is 
 distinguishable from the latter. The first amendment to the Constitu- 
 tion, in declaring that Congress shall make no law respecting the estab- 
 lishment of religion, or forbidding the free exercise thereof, was in- 
 tended to allow everyone under the jurisdiction of the United States to 
 entertain such notions respecting his relations to his Maker and the 
 duties they impose as may be approved by his judgment and conscience, 
 and to exhibit his sentiments in such form of worship as he may think 
 proper, not injurious to the equal rights of others, and to prohibit 
 legislation for the support of any religious tenets, or the modes of wor- 
 ship of any sect. The oppressive measures adopted and the cruelties 
 and punishments inflicted by the Governments of Europe for many ages 
 to compel parties to conform, in their religious beliefs and modes of 
 worship, to the views of the most numerous sect and the folly of at- 
 tempting in that way to control the mental operations of persons and 
 enforce an outward conformity to a prescribed standard led to the 
 adoption of the amendment in question. 
 
 It was never intended or supposed that the amendment could he in- 
 voked as a protection against legislation for the punishment of acts 
 inimical to the peace, good order, and morals of society. With man's 
 relations to his Maker and the obligations he may think they impose, 
 and the manner in which an expression shall be made by him of his 
 belief on those subjects, no interference can be permitted, provided 
 always the laws of society, designed to secure its peace and prosperity 
 and the morals of its people, are not interfered with. However free the 
 exercise of religion may be. it must be subordinate to the criminal laws 
 of the country, passed with reference to actions regarded by general 
 consent as properly the subjects of punitive legislation. There have 
 been sects which denied as a part of their religious tenets that there 
 should be any marriage tie, and advocated promiscuous intercourse of 
 the sexes as prompted by the passions of its members. And history dis- 
 closes the fact that the necessity of hus&an sacrifices, on special occa- 
 sions, has been a tenet of many sects. Should a sect of either of these 
 kinds ever find its way into this country, swift punishment would follow 
 the carrying into effect of its doctrines, and no heed would be given to 
 the pretense that, as religious beliefs, their supporters could be pro- 
 tected in their exercise by the Constitution of the United States. Prob- 
 ably never before in the history of this country has it been seriously 
 contended that the whole punitive power of the Government for acts, 
 recognized by the general consent of the Christian world in modern 
 times as proper matters for prohibitory legislation, must be suspended 
 in order that the tenets of a religious sect encouraging crime may be 
 carried out without hindrance. 
 
 In construing the restrictive laws of State legislatures the 
 State courts have sometimes held that they should not be con- 
 strued as prohibiting the practice of healing by other than 
 medical practitioners, because the intention to legislate against 
 the liberties of the citizen should not be assumed. In the case 
 of Nelson v. State Board of Health (22 Ky., Law Rep., 438) the 
 attempt was made to prevent an osteopath from practicing his 
 profession in that State because he had not procured a license 
 to practice from the board of health. The court held that the 
 osteopath was not within the terms of the statute, because he 
 was not practicing medicine, and said : 
 
 If the act applied to appellant, he can in no case practice his system 
 in this State, for, however well qualified he may be, he can not be ex- 
 amined for license as a physician, and he could not, without abandon- 
 ing his practice as an osteopath, obtain a diploma from a medical 
 41917—10969 
 
id 
 
 college. If the statute applies to him. it also applies to trained 
 nurses aqd all others of that class who for compensation administer to 
 the- wants of the sick. The result of such a construction of the statute 
 would be to compel everyone, whether willing or unwilling, to employ a 
 registered physician to care for him when he is sick, or to trust himself 
 entirely to gratuitous services, however much he might prefer skillful 
 nursing to medical treatment. It is doubtful if the legislature has the 
 right under the Constitution thus to restrict the free choice of the 
 citizen in a master concerning only himself and not the people at large. 
 Taking the statute as a whole, we do not think that this was within 
 the legislative intent, or that the act was designed to do more thaa 
 regulate the practice of medicine by physicians and surgeons. 
 
 The case of State v. Mylod (20 R. I., 632) is to the same 
 effect. In that case it was said: 
 
 It follows therefore that the acts complained of are excluded from 
 the operation of said Cap. 165 unless the words " practice of medi- 
 cine," taken in their ordinary or popular meaning, "includes them, or 
 unless it appears from said chapter that the legislative intent was to 
 give to said words a meaning broader and more inclusive than the 
 popular one. 
 
 Medicine, in the popular sense, is a remedial substance. The practica 
 of medicine, as ordinarily or popularly understood, has relation to the 
 art of preventing, curing, or alleviating disease or pain. It rests largely 
 in the sciences of anatomy, physiology, and hygiene ; it requires a 
 knowledge of disease, its origin, its anatomical and physiological fea- 
 tures, and its causative relations ; and, further, it requires a knowledge 
 of drugs, their preparation and action. Popularly it consists in the 
 discovery of the cause and nature of disease and the administration at 
 remedies or the prescribing of treatment therefor. 
 
 Prayer for those suffering from disease, or words of encouragement or 
 the teaching that disease will disappear and physical perfection be 
 attained as a result of prayer or that humanity will be brought Into 
 harmony with God by right thinking and a fixed determination to look 
 on the bright side of life, does not constitute the practice of medicine 
 in the popular sense. 
 
 * S * * • * * 
 
 * * * While it true that the study and treatment of mental dls= 
 ease constitute one of the departments or branches of medicine ia 
 which the influence of the mind over the body is recognized, yet mere 
 words of encouragement, prayer for divine assistance, or the teaching 
 of Christian Science as testified, in the opinion of the court, does not 
 constitute the practice of medicine in either of its branches in the 
 statutory or popular sense. 
 
 To give to the words " practice of medicine " the construction claimed 
 for them by the State, in the opinion of the court, would lead to un- 
 intended results. The testimony shows that Christian Scientists are a 
 recognized sect or school. They hold common beliefs, accept the same 
 teachings, recognize as true the same theories and principles. If the 
 practice of Christian Science is the practice of medicine, Christian 
 ■Science is a school or system of medicine, and is entitled to recognition 
 by the State board of 'health to the same extent as other schools or 
 systems of medicine. Under said Cap. 165 it can not be discrimi- 
 nated against, and its members are entitled to certificates to practice 
 medicine provided they possess the statutory qualifications. The stat- 
 ute, in conferring upon the State board of health authority to pass 
 upon the qualification of applicants for such certificates, does not confer 
 upon said board arbitrary power. The board can not determine which 
 school or system of medicine in its theories and the practices is right ; 
 it can only determine whether the applicant possesses the statutory 
 qualification to practice in accordance with the recognized theories of a 
 particular school or system. 
 
 It would be absurd to hold that under said Cap. 165, which pro- 
 vides against discrimination, the requirements necessary to entitle an 
 applicant to a certificate were such that the members of a particular 
 school or system could not comply with them, thus adopting a con- 
 struction which would operate not as a discrimination only, but as a 
 prohibition. On the other hand, to hold that a person who does not 
 know or pretend to know anything about disease, or about the method 
 of ascertaining the presence or the nature of disease, or about the 
 nature, preparation, or use of drugs or remedies, and who never ad- 
 ministers them, may obtain a certificate to practice medicine, is to hold 
 that the operation of the statute is to defeat the beneficial purposes for 
 which it was enacted. 
 41917—10969 
 
74 
 
 The case of State r. MeKnight (131 N. C.) was another 
 action affecting the right of an osteopathic practitioner to prac- 
 tice without a license. The court in that case used this lan- 
 guage : 
 
 The State has not restricted the cure of the body to the practice of 
 medicine and surgery — " allopathy," as it is termed — nor required that 
 before anyone can be treated for any bodily ill the physician must 
 have acquired a competent knowledge of allopathy and be licensed by 
 those skilled therein. To do that would be to limit progress by estab- 
 lishing allopathy as the State system of healing and forbidding all 
 others. This would be as foreign to our system as a State church for 
 the cure of souls. All the State has done has been to enact that when 
 one wishes to practice " medicine or surgery " he must, as a protec- 
 tion to the public — not to the doctors — be examined and licensed by 
 those skilled in " surgery and medicine." To restrict all healing to 
 that one kind — to allopathy — excluding homeopathy, osteopathy, and all 
 other treatments, might be a protection to doctors in " surgery and 
 medicine," but that is not the object of the act, and might make it 
 unconstitutional, because creating a monopoly. 
 
 The State can only regulate for the protection of the public. There 
 is also " divine science " (which some one has said is neither divine 
 nor a science), and there may be other methods still. Whether these 
 shall be licensed and regulated is a matter for the lawmaking power 
 to determine before any question in that respect can come before the 
 court. Certainly a statute requiring examination and license " before 
 beginning the practice of medicine or surgery " neither regulates nor 
 forbids any mode of treatment which absolutely excludes medicines and 
 surgery from its pathology. 
 
 Mr. President, this confirms what I have already said — that 
 where the statute provides in terms for the regulation of the 
 practice of medicine and surgery schools of practitioners who 
 do not resort to the use of drugs or the knife are not affected 
 and therefore not interested in its enforcement. But the trouble 
 is that in many of these laws the definition of " practicing medi- 
 cine " includes all kinds of healing or treatment, thus avoiding 
 the effect of the decided cases on the subject. So in such cases 
 the question becomes one of the constitutionality of the law. 
 No one should question the constitutional right of the States 
 to regulate the " practice of medicine and surgery." Certainly 
 I do not. Anyone who practices the use of drugs or the knife 
 should establish his competency in that respect. The legislature 
 of a State would undoubtedly have the right, also, to regulate 
 the practice of Christian Science by providing for the establish- 
 ment of a board of examiners to determine their fitness and com- 
 petency to practice that mode of healing. But the board should. 
 of course, have knowledge of the qualifications necessary for 
 such practice. 
 
 Christian Scientists would welcome such a law, as they desire 
 that only persons competent and conscientious should practice 
 their mode of healing. What they and different schools of medi- 
 cine object to is that they shall be examined as to their com- 
 petency to practice a means of healing in which they do not 
 believe and in which they do not claim to be efficient or com- 
 petent. The result of such a law is to compel an examination 
 as to their competency to practice a system of healing, not with 
 any view of determining their fitness to practice what they 
 make claim to practice. 
 
 That means simple prohibition just as effectually as if the 
 ^statute provided in terms that a Christian Scientist shall not 
 practice healing or the amelioration of suffering. This dis- 
 tinction was recognized in the State v. Wilcox (64 Kans., 789), 
 41917— 109G9 
 
75 
 
 in which the court, having held that the State had the power 
 to regulate the practice of medicine, said further : 
 
 The act is not invalid because it provides that " Nothing in this act 
 shall be construed as interfering with any religious beliefs in the treat- 
 ment of diseases, providing that quarantine regulations relating to con- 
 tagious diseases are not infringed upon. (Sec. 6, Gen. Stat., 1901, par. 
 6674.) The express exclusion of the element of religious belief in the 
 application of the law was hardly necessary. Religious freedom is 
 guaranteed by the Constitution, and without mention in the statute 
 would have been implied, and we can see nothing in this provision 
 which makes an illegal discrimination against or in favor of any class 
 of physicians. 
 
 This lauguage is significant. It expressly recognizes the fact 
 that religious freedom exercised in the way of healing can not 
 be abridged under the Constitution. 
 
 Mr. President, the question of both the constitutionality and 
 justice of some of the bills enacted by State legislation intended 
 to restrict or prohibit the practice of healing by Christian Sci- 
 entists have been commented upon by the governors of some of 
 the States in veto messages. Thus Gov. Mickey, of Nebraska, 
 has this to say in one of his veto messages : 
 
 The constitution of the State of Nebraska declares that " all persons 
 have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God accord- 
 ing to the dictates of their own consciences," and further adds, " nor 
 shall any interference with the rights of conscience be permitted." la 
 the Christian Science religion the idea of worship and of divine healing 
 are so intermingled that it is impossible to draw the line of demarcation, 
 and hence interference with the one or the other is an interference with 
 " the rights of conscience " and thus becomes an infringement of the 
 constitutional guaranty of religious freedom. 
 
 And Gov. Peabody, of Colorado, used this language in a mes- 
 sage vetoing such a bill : 
 
 Guided by the late experience of similar legislation In other States, 
 the conclusion is irresistible that all such legislation has a tendency to 
 restrict the citizen in the employment of whomsoever he pleases in the 
 treatment of his diseases, and it also has a tendency to build up, under 
 the protection of the State, a trust or combination of certain schools of 
 medicine to the exclusion of all others equally meritorious. 
 
 Gov. Thomas, of the same State, in a like case, used this clear 
 and emphatic language: 
 
 The department of surgery excepted, medicine is not a science. It is 
 a series of experiments, more or less successful, and will become a 
 science when the laws of health and disease are fully ascertained and 
 understood. This can be done, not by arresting the progress of experi- 
 ment and binding men down to hard and fast rules of treatment, but by 
 giving free rein to the man who departs from the beaten highway and 
 discovers hidden methods and remedies by the wayside. * * * 
 
 The true intent and purpose of the bill is to restrict the profession 
 of medicine to the three schools therein mentioned, and then limit the 
 number of practitioners to- suit the judgment of the composite board. 
 People desiring medical or surgical service may employ its licentiates 
 or die without the consolation of the healer. This is but to say that 
 a medical trust is to be established which shall regulate demand and 
 supply by absolute control of the product which forms its basis, the 
 general assembly furnishing the appliances whereby the trust shall 
 become effectual. 
 
 The integrity and usefulness of every profession must be guaranteed 
 to society, which may establish standards for the members thereof and 
 for the observance of which its sanction should be given. Beyond this, 
 each profession takes care of itself, and legislative interference Is 
 tyranny, open or disguised. * * * 
 
 The fundamental vice of the bill is that it denies absolutely to the 
 individual the right to select his own physician. This is a right of 
 conscience, and as sacred as that which enables the citizen to worship 
 God as he may desire. It is, indeed, the same right manifesting itself 
 in a parallel direction. It is a part of the law of this land, and no 
 41917—10969 
 
70 
 
 civil power is strong enough to deprive the citizen of its exercise. He 
 may, indeed, select a healer of doubtful reputation or conceded incom- 
 petence, but that is his affair just as much as is his choice of a 
 minister or attorney. His action may prove injurious, possiblv fatal, 
 to himself or to some members of his family. It is better so "than to 
 delegate to any tribunal the power to say " thou shalt not employ this 
 man " or " thou shalt employ this one." That this bill produces such 
 a result indirectly makes it the more objectionable. It is not the out- 
 spoken and aggressive assault upon individual libertv that men should 
 fear, but the indirect or resultant blow that is masked and falls unex- 
 pectedly. 
 
 The bill, like all kindred forms of paternalism, assumes that the 
 citizen can not take care of himself. The State must lead him as a 
 little child, lest he fall into trouble unawares. He must be guarded 
 and chided, limited here and licensed there, for his own protection. 
 Such a system, born of the union of church and state, crumbles into 
 ashes in. the crucible of experience. It can not flourish, though dis- 
 guised in the garments of an alleged public necessity. The privilege of 
 choosing one's own physician is a positive essential to the public health. 
 Yet this bill assumes to thrust the coarse machinery of the criminal law 
 into one of the most sacred relations of human life, to drag the chosen 
 physician, if unlicensed, from the sick couch to the prison cell, and to 
 substitute for him some one who, however exalted and honorable, may 
 not command the confidence or secure the sympathy of his patient. 
 
 These comments are not extreme, for it must be remembered that 
 those who believe in and patronize the various arts of healing that are 
 ostracized by this bill form a very large part of every community, nor 
 are they confined to the ignorant and superstitious portions of society. 
 They number in their ranks thousands of the most refined, intelligent, 
 and conscientious people. They recognize in many modern forms of 
 relief to the suffering a religious or spiritual element that appeals to 
 their best and tenderest sympathies. The benefits they claim and the 
 cures they narrate are not imaginary. Shall the Government enact by 
 statute that these people shall not "longer enjoy their benefits or put 
 them into daily practice? Shall it officially declare these people to be 
 criminally wrong and the three schools legally right? By what 
 authority does it so declare? 
 
 A distinguished physician of Massachusetts has recently declared 
 with force that " the Commonwealth has no right to a medical opinion 
 and should not dare to take sides in a medical controversy." It would 
 be as consistent to take sides in a theological or philosophical discus- 
 sion. The one would be condemned by all men ; the other is equally 
 foreign to the province of government. It may regulate but can not 
 prohibit the calling of the citizens ; it may prevent the commission of 
 wrongs but can not deprive the individual of the right to choose his own 
 advisers. 
 
 Mr. President, I am about to conclude what I have to say. I 
 have taken up too much of the time of the Senate. But I could 
 not remain silent when the liberties of the people and the con- 
 stitutional rights of the States are threatened. There has been 
 no legislation more dangerous or pernicious than the entire sys- 
 tem of laws, State and National, that are being forced upon the 
 people of this country by the political doctors, who are consider- 
 ing only their own selfish interests without regard to the public 
 welfare. I have considered not only the' bill now before the 
 Senate but legislation in the States, because they are a part of 
 one general effort to procure legislation that will establish for- 
 ever one school of medicine to the exclusion of all others. 
 
 If this effort is successful it will create the worst, the most 
 intolerant, and the most dangerous monopoly and trust the 
 country has ever known. It will be the more intolerant and 
 offensive, as well as more powerful, because it is a trust created 
 by law and supported by all the powers of the Government. 
 The author of the bill has graciously consented to amend it so 
 as to provide that there shall be no discrimination in favor of or 
 against any school of medicine. He could very well do this. 
 It is a perfectly harmless and useless provision and will pro- 
 tect no one. Does anyone suppose tbat Ibis bureau, made iude- 
 
 41917— 109 GO 
 
77 
 
 pendent by this bill, with an allopathic doctor at its head, and 
 without doubt a member of the American Medical Association, 
 will give any consideration to any mode of healing that does 
 not use drugs, or not discriminate against them, and in favor 
 of the regular school of medicine? Can anyone think so when 
 we look back over the past few years and see how these very 
 same doctors of the regular school have been using every 
 possible means to procure such laws as will not only discrim- 
 inate against but actually exterminate them? Now, it is pro- 
 posed to take the medical bureaus and others in any way con- 
 nected with the preservation of the public health out of tho 
 departments and bring them under one control, independent and 
 autocratic. What may be expected to happen? Why, with this 
 unlimited power in his bands, with the right to make rules and 
 regulations for the government of his department, he will do, 
 by his rules and regulations, just what he and his fellow 
 doctors have for years been trying to get the States to do by 
 law, declare the practice of Christian Science and other modes 
 of healing that they have condemned as a menace to the public 
 health and suppress such practice. You say he is not allowed 
 to discriminate or to interfere with the practice of medicine ! 
 
 Why, Mr. President, if he is honest, and has been honest in 
 promoting restrictive and prohibitive legislation in the States 
 against such practices, he will say : " I must protect the public 
 health. That is the prime duty impose'd upon me by this law. 
 To do it I must destroy the tendency to put away drugs and 
 resort to quacks and charlatans. They are not entitled to pro- 
 tection. I will do my duty and suppress them in every way 
 possible." If anyone supposes that ways will not be found to 
 accomplish this result, with a doctor in control and at the head 
 of a bureau that is independent of control by any higher power, 
 he does not appreciate the capacity of the regular school of 
 medicine to maintain itself by the destruction of other means 
 of healing. 
 
 Mr. President, as I have said, this whole movement is by 
 and in the interest of doctors of the regular school. No one else 
 is demanding this law. They have manipulated political con- 
 ventions and procured a plank in the platform of both of the 
 great political parties, declaring in favor of establishing a de- 
 partment of health, with its head a member of the Cabinet. 
 They have besieged the White House and pleaded for assistance 
 from the President. They have infested the Halls of Congress 
 for years past in the effort to secure the passage of laws that 
 would place them in power and give them absolute control of 
 the medical activities of the Government. In pressing forward 
 this bold scheme they have tried to deceive the public, and have 
 largely succeeded, by claiming that such legislation is in the 
 public interest. They insist that their mode of healing is the 
 only safe or reliable one, and that to resort to any other is to 
 endanger the public health. 
 
 Their efforts have of late been directed chiefly against Chris- 
 tian Scientists and their mode of practice. They insist that the 
 practice of their mode of healing is a fraud on the people and 
 a menace to the public health. Why, Mr. President, I could by 
 a mere call fill this Capitol Building with conscientious and re- 
 liable men and women, people of high character and unques- 
 41917—10969 
 
(b 
 
 tioned sincerity, who would bear witness to their healing by 
 this means and their faith in its efficacy. Thousands of these 
 many of them within my own personal knowledge, have been 
 healed of what the doctors call incurable diseases, and many 
 of them after the doctors had given up their cases as hopeless. 
 Naturally these people protest against any law that will de- 
 prive them, or anyone else, of the right to resort to this remedy 
 for their relief. In the name of these people, in the name of 
 those believing in other modes of healing, in the name of a 
 liberty-loving people, I protest against any law or regulation 
 that will deny them the right or abridge their liberty to give or 
 accept relief of their choice, or their religious rights. 
 41917—10960 
 
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 &U1.E14 W89 
 
 Works 
 
 To establish sn independent health 
 
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