Quacks and grafters / by Ex-osteopath; being an exposé of the state of therapeutics at the present time, with some reasons why such grafters flourish, and suggestions to remedy the deplorable muddle.

Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Quacks and grafters / by Ex-osteopath; being an exposé of the state of therapeutics at the present time, with some reasons why such grafters flourish, and suggestions to remedy the deplorable muddle. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    Students soon learned that they were never to ask, Can we treat this ? That indicated skepticism, which was intolerable in the atmosphere of optimistic faith that surrounded the freshman and sophomore classes especially. The question was to be put, How do we treat this? In the treatment of worms the ques- tion was, How do we treat worms? That was easy. Had not nature made a machine, perfect in all its parts, self-oiling, autotherapeutic, and all that? And would nature allow it to choke up or slip a cog just because a little thing like a worm got tangled in its gearing? Not much. Nature knew that worms would intrude, and had provided her own vermifuge. The cause of worms is insufficient bile, and behold, all the Osteopath had to do when he wished to serve notice on the aforesaid worms to vacate the prem- ises was to touch the button controlling the stop- cock to the bile-duct, and they left. It was so simple and easy we wondered how the world could have been so long finding it out. Osteopathy was complete. That was the proposi- tion on which we were to stand. If anything had to be removed, or brought back, or put in place, all that was necessary was to open the floodgates, release the pent-up forces of nature, and the thing was done! What a happy condition, to have perfect faith! I remember a report came to our school of an Osteo- pathic physician who read a paper before a convention of his brethren, in which he recorded marvelous cures performed in cases of tuberculosis. The paper was startling, even revolutionary, yet it was not too much [122]