Will the law allow patients to be punished for employing those the law pronounces qualified?

But there is another consideration, equally serious :

The rule in question is the action of an organized body of men. It is the act of a combination. The men thus combining are considered by many-and consider themselves-the most competent practitioners, the only fully-qualified practitioners of the State. By adopting this rule, they combine to deprive the community of the best advice to be had in cases of sickness. Such a combination is against common law, and the provisions of statute as well. (Penal Code, § 168.) It is a conspiracy against the "public health."

In a case which came before the Supreme Court, in 1857, Judge Marvin decided that a resolution of the Medical Society of Erie County, fixing a tariff of fees to be charged for services to be performed for the County, and prohibiting any physician from accepting lower rates, was inconsistent with the laws of the State, because against public policy, and in the nature of a combination to deprive the County of medical services, and to compel a certain compensation. (The People ex rel. Gray v. Med. Soc. of Erie Co., 24 B., 570.)

Such a resolution, or by-law, could only be enforced by expulsion. Expulsion is disfranchisement—that is, deprivation of membership of a society, a connection with which is a valuable privilege. And a qualified physician is to be disfranchised for giving his advice in a critical case, because another physician is in attendance whose employment makes the case more critical. (People ex rel. Bartlett v. Erie Co. Med. Soc., 32 N. Y., 187.)

The old rule is not humane. The reasons for and against any proposition are to be weighed rather than counted. Admit that the progress of true medical science by discountenancing and so extinguishing error, and the consequent ultimate good of society, are weighty considerations. Yet they are not paramount-they are not controlling. The paramount, the controlling, consideration is the present need of the sick and afflicted of 1883, whom the laws in force in 1883 surround with various classes of "qualified practitioners."

But is it the fact that true science is best promoted by keeping aloof from those who adhere to false science? It is by conference, by conflict, that truth is brought out and made to reach the minds of those who have been misled. And how and where can a true system of therapeutics be better taught than at the bedside of the patient?

If it be true that error may be tolerated if truth is left free to combat it, then truth should have every possible opportunity afforded it to contend with error r; and qualified practitioners" should seek, rather than avoid, consultations together, that truth may triumph and error die. It is wholly immaterial that the attending physician is not obliged to follow the directions of the consulting physician. If he fail to do so, the result will furnish the most conclusive and impressive test to distinguish true science from false.

Nor need the enlightened practitioner deem the association degrading. One who, during three wonderful years, went about healing the sick and relieving the afflicted, felt it no indignity that one poor sufferer touched the border of his garment, "who had spent all her living upon physicians and could not be healed of any." And this fact seems to be mentioned as one reason more why she should be relieved, and not as any reason why she should not.

But the dignity of the medical profession and the interests of medical science are not the paramount consideration: the sufferings and anguish and peril of the sick and afflicted of to-day are the paramount consideration and control this controversy.

And we have here the true answer to the argument, that to do away with the old rule against consultations involves the repeal of all restrictions, that the controversy involves the policy of any Code of Ethics.

It might be a sufficient answer to this "argument" to say that consistency does not require that he who favors the repeal of one restriction should favor the repeal of all. We are told the Code does not allow physicians to own patents for medicines or instruments, to advertise or to publish cures. No one proposes to remove these restrictions. But does the Code prohibit consultations with physicians who advertise or publish cures ? If it contained such restrictions, there would be more force in the analogy. As it is, the argument against the old rule must be considered as directed against this one restriction, and not against all restrictions; and against this restriction, because even if the dignity of the profession were compromised and the progress of medical science impeded by maintaining the prohibition (although neither consequence, it is believed, will follow the new rule), yet paramount above these and all other considerations is the Health of the community. SALUS POPULI, SUPREMA LEX.

D. R. JAQUES,

Professor Municipal Law, University of New York.

REQUIESCAT IN PACE.

BY A. JACOBI, M.D.,

PROFESSOR IN THE COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS,
NEW YORK CITY.

The principles or notions of Hahnemann were as follows: The office of the physician is to remove disease. Of the latter, the symptoms only are perceptible. Internal changes cannot be recognized. They are mostly the results of allopathic treatment. To make or attend post-mortem examinations is useless. The disease is removed with the removal of the symptoms. Medicines have their symptoms, like diseases. What they can do, must be studied in the healthy. The treatment of the "old school," "contraria contrarius" may remove symptoms, but they return and become incurable. The dogma of "similia similibus" is the only law of treatment. Its value and efficiency compare with "old school" medcine as day with night. Medicine produces disease. The natural disease becomes extinct by the effect of the similar and more powerful one produced by medicine. Thus the fear of the roar of cannon in the heart of the soldier is

156

removed by the roar of drumming. Acute disease results from telluric and atmospheric influences, etc.; also from latent " psora." Chronic disease, from allopathic medicines, syphilis, "condyloma disease," and "psora." Their symptoms must be learned principally from the report of the patient, which must not be interrupted. The medicinal agent which is to cure a disease is that which produces, when given in sufficient dose, a disease similar to that which is to be healed. The effects of an experimental (large) dose are very numerous; they are recorded after a single dose, from the report of the person experimented upon, for days, weeks, and months. Some of the drugs have one thousand or two thousand symptoms. The effects of a medicine are either primary or secondary. The first, is the one wanted. The latter must be avoided. Impairment is sometimes seen at first; the more rarely, the smaller the dose. The medicine must be given but once every few days or weeks. But one medicine must be given at a time. When a remedy is found not to be quite appropriate after some time, another must be selected. The effect of the medicine is dynamic. The smaller the dose the greater the dynamic effect.

Shaking and diluting in a certain manner, in

crease the effect. Only potencies are homœopathic remedies. Neither senses nor chemistry must be capable of discovering any thing medicinal in the medicine to be administered. Every thing is cured by homoeopathy except the moribund condition, old age, and the loss of a vital part.

The Medical News asserts that homoeopathy "has been a thorn and pitfall in the way of progress." That is in direct contradiction to the history of medical science. Homœopathy has neither aided nor obstructed, the progress of medicine. It never claimed to revolutionize or teach any thing, but medicinal therapeutics. Its assumption, that disease was something foreign to the organism (of which the latter could be delivered by some new enemy endowed with similar properties), was so contrary to the medical mind, waking up to the conception and definition of disease as a complex of symptoms depending on changed conditions, that it never, had the slightest influence, on the labors of the men who shaped the fate of medical science during this century. It is true, that homoeopathic practitioners had, and have, "a highly respectable and intelligent following" (P. E. Chase, on medical legislation, in the Proceedings of the