ready to give counsel to the public in relation to matters especially appertaining to their profession, as on subjects of medical police, public hygiene, and legal medicine. It is their province to enlighten the public in regard to quarantine regulations—the location, arrangement, and dietaries of hospitals, asylums, schools, prisons, and similar institutions in relation to the medical police of towns, as drainage, ventilation, etc.—and in regard to measures for the prevention of epidemic and contagious diseases; and when pestilence prevails, it is their duty to face the danger, and to continue their labors for the alleviation of the suffering, even at the jeopardy of their own lives. § 2. Medical men should also be always ready, when called on by the legally constituted authorities, to enlighten coroners' inquests and courts of justice, on subjects strictly medical-such as involve questions relating to sanity, legitimacy, murder by poisons or other violent means, and in regard to the various other subjects embraced in the science of Medical Jurisprudence. But in these cases, and especially where they are required to make a post-mortem examination, it is just, in consequence of the time, labor, and skill required, and the responsibility and risk they incur, that the public should award them a proper honorarium. § 3. There is no profession by the members of which eleemosynary services are more liberally dispensed than the medical, but justice requires that some limits should be placed to the performance of such good offices. Poverty, professional brotherhood, and certain of the public duties referred to in the first section of this article, should always be recognized as presenting valid claims for gratuitous services; but neither institutions endowed by the public or by rich individuals, societies for mutual benefit, for the insurance of lives or for analogous purposes, nor any profession or occupation, can be admitted to possess such privilege. Nor can it be justly expected of physicians to furnish certificates of inability to serve on juries, to perform militia duty, or to testify to the state of health of persons wishing to insure their lives, obtain pensions, or the like, without a pecuniary acknowledgment. But to individuals in indigent circumstances, such professional services should always be cheerfully and freely accorded. § 4. It is the duty of physicians, who are frequent witnesses of the enormities committed by quackery, and the injury to health and even destruction of life caused by the use of quack medicines, to enlighten the public on these subjects, to expose the injuries sustained by the unwary from the devices and pretensions of artful empirics and impostors. Physicians ought to use all the influence which they may possess, as professors in Colleges of Pharmacy, and by exercising their option in regard to the shops to which their prescriptions shall be sent, to discourage druggists and apothecaries from vending quack or secret medicines, or from being in any way engaged in their manufacture and sale. ART. II.-Obligations of the public to physicians. 1. The benefits accruing to the public, directly and indirectly, from the active and unwearied beneficence of the profession, are so numerous and important, that physicians are justly entitled to the utmost consideration and respect from the community. The public ought likewise to entertain a just appreciation of medical qualifications; to make a proper discrimination between true science and the assumption of ignorance and empiricism-to afford every encouragement and facility for the acquisition of medical education -and no longer to allow the statute-books to exhibit the anomaly of exacting knowledge from physicians, under a liability to heavy penalties, and of making them obnoxious to punishment for resorting to the only means of obtaining it. CATALOGUE OF THE OFFICERS OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. PRESIDENTS AND VICE-PRESIDENTS OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 1847-48. PHILADELPHIA. PRESIDENT. NATHANIEL CHAPMAN, M. D., Pennsylvania. VICE-PRESIDENTS. JONATHAN KNIGHT, M.D., Connecticut. ALEXANDER H. STEVENS, M.D., New York. 1848-49. BALTIMORE. PRESIDENT. ALEXANDER H. STEVENS, M.D., New York. VICE-PRESIDENTS. JOHN C. WARREN, M.D., Massachusetts. PAUL F. EVE, M.D., Georgia. W. M. AWL, M.D., Ohio. |