NEW SOOTHSAYERS

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 68, 21 March 1931, Page 24

NEW SOOTHSAYERS

I once mentioned to an Italian Army doctor the words "public opinion." He shrugged a graceful shoulder. "With us there is no need. We press a button in Eome, and seventy provincial centres think alike." I could only suggest humbly that we should borrow Mussolini for a year to set our house in order, writes C. M. Kohan, secretary of the New Health Society, in tho "Daily Mail." What would Mussolini do with our quacks? They call themselves "doctors," literally "men of learning," a relative term covering a multitude of pretensions and pretence. They must not call themselves Doctors of Medicine, but they car be doctors of Nature, doctors of natural healing, doctors of nurture, what you will. We allow them to flourish, and only bring them to book for the more flagrant homicides of their practice. There are many ways of killing a patient; unfortunately few of them are illegal. One of the corollaries to the proposition that we are free men living in a free country is that we should be allowed to go to the devil in our own way. The State is seldom iv the mood to interfere except that, unlike the law of Continental countries, our law punishes us for attempting suicide. If a quack helps us to a more protracted form of self-destruction, the law stands benevolently aside. The trouble about quacks is their extreme plausibility. Their patients are by no means drawn from tho poor and the ill-educated. Quacks flourish in the precincts of Park lane and Harley street, as well as in the humbler areas of the metropolis and the provincial cities. Their incomes bear comparison with those of the most eminent special- | ists. Their consulting-rooms are fashionably and impressively furnished. They speak with a wealth of technical phrasing. They look as wise and as | grave as Lord Burloigh himself in Sheridan's "The Critic." And indeed a nod of the head from a quack can be as full of profound significance as a now from an M.D., F.K.C.S. They remind one of what an American was

WHY QUACKS PROSPER

heard to say of Ms native "near beer": "It looks like beer, it smells like beer, it tastes like beer, but it ain't got the authority." The unqualified ■ practitioner rejects with opeu contempt the common fund of knowledge laboriously acquired by generations of brilliant investigators. He knows better. In his ear "Nature has whispered her inmost secrets. The logic of cause and effect on which medical science has been built up, stone by stone,' is not the well and truly laid foundation of his method, which at bestis one of trial and error. The quack's strength lies in his grasp of our wretched human folly. In the docks of the great seaports seafaring men delight to pay a guinea for a bottle of coloured water rather than take advantage of the free medical treatment offered by the Public Health Department. In the old days it was the soothsayers, tho astrologers, the alchemists who dug deep their claws in the soft flesh of human credulity. They are all still with us under other guises. It is not only in England that the quack flourishes. He is most at home in the United States, and even the solid and well-informed Germans are finding him a menace in their midst. They have started a now society in Germany, known as the German Society for Combatting Quackery. TMs organisation is working on lines similar to those adopted by the Bureau of Investigation of the American Medical Association, which for a quarter of a century has been exposing various nostrums, quack schemes, and medical fads and frauds. The society is issuing arresting posters. They contain wise advice and pungent epigram, and* no doubt they will make tho German public think and think again. Is it not time that we took organised action against quackery? There are unqualified practitioners who should certainly bo blacklisted, and some strong action is called for, especially in regard to those who now profess to euro cancer and other malignant conditions. Tho public must bo protected against its own ignorance and credulity.