Quacks, false remedies and the public health / [David Walsh].

  • Walsh, David
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Quacks, false remedies and the public health / [David Walsh]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Years ago it came to the author’s knowledge that a prominent member of Parliament, a titled man, since dead, was a shareholder in one of the most notorious of the kidney cure companies then and _ still in existence. A much advertised internal remedy for baldness has been found to contain hemoglobin, “the dead colour- ing matter of the blood of warm-blooded animals.” There is not any scientific evidence to show that either hemoglobin or any other drug can exert a specific action in promoting the growth of the hair when take internally. : EXISTING METHODS OF CONTROL, DIRECT AND INDIRECT, OVER QUACKS AND QUACKERY. It may be said at once that there is no effectual control over the evil of irregular medical practice. The Charter of Henry VIII. empowering and direct- ing the Royal College of Physicians of London to deal summarily with false practitioners and _ false ‘* poticaries’’? in London and seven miles round has not been properly carried out, although again and again ratified in successive Acts up to the Medical Act of 1858, which created the General Medical Council. Their penal powers, however, were exercised intermittently. for centuries and in the year 1857 we find the College asserting its right in “ Churchill’s Medical Directory’? to commit offenders to New- gate. So far as that goes, in 1909 we find the Royal College of Physicians of London, in their objection to the Charter applied for by the British Medical Association, formally asserting their rights of control over irregular medical practice. Presumably the Physicians accepted that responsibility only under authoritative legal advice. Section 4o of the Medical Act, 1858, made it a penal offence for any unqualified person to assume a medical title or any title implying him to be registered under the Act. In practice, owing to the interpretation of this section by judges and police magistrates, the Act is easily evaded by any charlatan. The only other method of prosecuting false practitioners is under the, Apothecaries’ Act, whereby that body is empowered to proceed against unqualified persons practising medicine, but only when they actually compound, and dispense, and sell their physic. This provision, again, is easily evaded by the quack, who need only sell his advice and throw his physic ready-made into the bargain. Feeble as this means of control of irregular medica! practice may be, it is the only one that has been available for generations past, in the absence of or the extremely