To establish an independent health service : speech of Hon. John D. Works ... in the Senate of the United States, Monday and Tuesday, April 29 and 30, 1912.

  • Works, John D. (John Downey), 1847-1928.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: To establish an independent health service : speech of Hon. John D. Works ... in the Senate of the United States, Monday and Tuesday, April 29 and 30, 1912. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    healing is based. The allopathic school of medicine is the oldest and best known. Its devotees are wholly dogmatic and intoler- ant. They assume that there is no other efficacious mode of healing but theirs, and that all other practitioners are incom- petents and a menace to the public health. They have formed one of the most powerful organizations of any kind in the country. They are ruthlessly using that power not to improve the practitioners of their own school only but to coerce all people to accept their remedies and to suppress, by law and by persecution, the practice of other means of healing. The American Medical Association is working in every State in the Union to secure laws which will prevent any but practitioners of their school from practicing the art of healing. They have secured such laws in some of the States, as I shall show farther along, and are tireless in their efforts to secure other like re- strictive laws in all other States. Having only partially suc- ceeded in their efforts in this direction in the States, they have for a long time been besieging Congress to help them to- entrench themselves with all the powers of the Government behind them where they will be supreme and may absolutely exclude all other practitioners than theirs from the practice of healing. They are using all the money and influence they can bring to bear and are practicing on the credulity of an ignorant public sentiment by the pretense that all of this is for the public good. Through their efforts the much-dreaded practice of vaccination, which has, in my opinion, sacrificed more lives than it has saved and maimed and made invalids of thousands, has been made compulsory by law: and now other serum remedies, alleged to be preventives of various diseases and equally dangerous, loath- some, and objectionable, are being forced upon the people whether they want them or not. The officers of the Army and Navy are the willing instruments ©f these medical men to compel American citizens to submit to be poisoned with their loathsome preparations. If a soldier or sailor refuses to submit to vaccination or other serum treat- ment for typhoid fever and other diseases, he is promptly dis- missed the service, or placed in irons uutil he submits, or is otherwise punished. And now these doctors want Congress to so legislate as to give them full control of the medical, sani- tary, and hygienic activities and bureaus of the Government that their powers may be complete. The doctors of this school hold every medical position in the Government, to the exclusion of every other school, and no one who believes in the prevention or healing of disease by any other means than theirs need apply. Mr. President, the one great trouble is that the people do not think for themselves in any matter affecting the public health. They have preferred to rely upon the doctors and to be guided and controlled by them. Public officials and the Congress of the United States do not trouble themselves about it or hold themselves responsible. They generally evince a sublime indif- ference to the subject beyond what the doctors say or recom- mend, and the people are fleeced of millions of dollars in al- leged works for the public health which had better be thrown away. They have much more faith in the doctors than the doctors have in themselves or in each other. The competent 41017—10960