Medical reform a public question, or, How to save twenty thousand lives per annum without putting the country to a farthing's expense / by a physician.

Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical reform a public question, or, How to save twenty thousand lives per annum without putting the country to a farthing's expense / by a physician. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    28/37 (page 27)
    possession of British diplomas, proving that the party had been adequately educated and examined should be the professional quack's only protec- tion against these penalties, and even this should not avail where the principle of the imposture was the sale of a specific. Secondly, the power of medical men to dispense medicines and to charge for them, to keep shops, or to meddle with drugs in any form whatever, should by the same law be utterly abolished ; and if any medi- cal man were found in any of these respects in- vading the rightful province of the druggist, he should be subjected to a fine of 100Z. for the first offence, imprisonment for twelve months for the second, and transportation for seven years for the third : thus would even-handed justice hold the doctors in one scale of her righteous balance and the druggists in the other, whilst, to the credit of the nation and the immense advantage of all classes of the commnnity, the quacks would no- where and no more be found. These, then, are the essential features of that reform which the protection of the public health demands; on these points the country should insist; the rest may be safely left to the doctors. But as the measures here proposed involve the vested interests of many thousand medical men, whose occupation (draught-selling) would, to a great extent, be gone, if they were carried out, it will save time to anticipate their objections.