THE MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS BILL.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume II, Issue 210, 7 September 1867, Page 2

THE MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS BILL.

To the Editor of the Nej^son Evening Mail Sir —l wish to thank you for your advocacy of the new Medical Bill, and,to explain some false impressions which have arisen in the course of the discussion. It is thought by some that medical men have urged its enactment, from a desire to prevent uneducated persons from practising j anyone who reads the bill will find this to be an error ; it leaves unqualified persons as it found them and permitß them to practice as before, but it prevents them from falsely using any title implying that they have passed a regular education and examination in medicine. "For? instance, if A, B, andd are three chemists,? and A and B write chemist over their shops, make up their drugs carefully, supply a mixture for a cough or cold, or, if a sick child is brought to them, have a. very good notion what is good for its indigestion or

diarrhoea, they are hcuest men, exercising a legitimate calling, and the new bill will protect them; but if C, who has less knowledge than they and more effrontery, writes "Dr" or, "Surgeon" over his shop, for the purpose of making people believe that he has had a medical education, the new bill ■will render him liable to a penalty, if he in this way tries to get more custom than his neighbors A and B. It would be affectation to deny that medical men, excepting those who are ashamed of: their cloth, wish for some enactment under which they can be enrolled (as lawyers are), so as to be distinguished at a glance from charlatans and unqualified persons. It is a well-known, though unwritten, law of honor among 4bem that every newly-discovered drug shall have its composition described in the medical journals and be tried in the great hospitals, so as at once to be available for the public if of any use ; and hence it is that, being sensitive of the honor of their profession, they desire to be distinguished from the charlatan, who pretends to have i some pills, or ointment, or herbs, the composition of which is known only to himself, but which can cure every ailment to which \ flesh is heir. I In the midst of the discussion it trans- j pires, that log-rolling, as politicians call it, is going on, the Auckland members j having stipulated that anyone qualified or unqualified, Maori or English, in practise before 1857, shall be registered, and it seems, all the opposition to the bill comes from persons calling themselves homoeopathists, who are afraid that it may leave out one of their great mystery mtn. The apparition of that nearly extinct creature a, homoeopath ist now a days, is almost as astounding as if a raoa or dinotberium were to come and oppose the bill. Nobody ■has -any exact idea what a homoeopathist is, and the word itself, which appears to I>eiß compound of the Colney Hatch and j3Eolic Greek dialects, defies translation, but in the popular mind it is supposed to be a person who gives globules, and abhors such mistiness as castor oil or rhubarb, and that anyone with a box of globules, and a book of directions can practise the art. The claim now is, that any such person, if possessed of the box and book before 1857, shall b£ registered, whether he fttieks to his globules, or whether he some times discards them, and has recourse to the full doses of the nasty medicines he used to abhor, and regular medical men object to being enrolled with such persons, most if not all of the qualified hoiuceopathUts of the present day are couscien- j tious enough to have recourse to full doßes of rational medicines, in those cases in which they think it wrong to trust to the globule, and it is incorrect, as hinted in some of the correspondence, to suppose that practitioners of rational medicine entertain any unkindly feelings towards them. They are sorry that members of the profession should have even a lingering belief in what common sense tells them is a delusion, and hope that as they have given up the traditions of the cures, which were formerly credited to mercury and blisters and bleeding, so the homoeopathist may soon come to give more credit to nature and less to the globule. Meanwhile they have no objection to being registered along with him if he has had a regular medical education and examination. But they do object to appearing in the same list with Te Ngatito the Haubau, who performed incantations and administered burnt sticks to his patients before 1857, or with the great Auckland medicine-man, who mixed a grain of arsenic with 8 or 10 tons of sugar, and called it Homoeopathy, or with C as above mentioned (A and B are too honest to make the claim), who has prescribed phyßic over the counter and applied sticking-plaster. Homceopathists may be visionary and impractical as much as they like, in believing in their own globules, but it is very unreasonable that for the sake of enabling "every person" who administered globules before 1857 to appear in borrowed plumes they should try to introduce a visionary and impracticable clause into the bill, which .^anyone with common sense might see will lead to endless litigation; and if the new Board has to decide what is medical practice and what is not, it has a nice task before it, and I hope Government will put £10,000 on the Estimates to pay its legal advisers' bill. I am, etc., ■ S. A. C. [The publication of this letter has been unavoidably delayed by press of other matter.— Eid.E. My]

The total amouut of beet sugar produced in the world is reported to be about 2,800,000 toua annually. France is the chief grower of beet sugar, and a small amount is raised in the United States.