From a lecture recently delivered by Professor Bland, LL.D., M.D., before the Medical Liberty League of Chicago, as published in the Medical Liberty News, and copied in the Washington News Letter, we extract the following:— "The assumption that these medical statutes are for the purpose of protecting the people against quacks is absurd. Medicine is not a science, hence all physicians are quacks, meaning by the term quack, experimenters, or pretenders to knowledge they do not possess. Some are learned quacks, while others are unlearned quacks, but the learned quacks illustrate the humorism of Josh Billings, who said, 'What is the use of knowing so much if what you know is not so.' They belong to the class that Mark Twain referred to, who make the accumulation "of ignorance the business of their lives. My observation has convinced me that, as a rule, the learned quack is more dangerous to the lives of patients than the less learned; he takes more risks, he is more reckless in the dispensing of poisons, and besides he is in a ring of quacks who protect each other against the legal consequences of their blunders. The object of such laws is to give monopoly to the doctors who are in the ring and to outlaw all others. In the language of Professor James, of Harvard Medical College, it is a system of medical trades-unmionism under authority of law. The effect of this is to prevent progress in medicine; it is therefore the enemy of science. It denies the right to the people of choosing their own physicians. This, said Herbert Spencer, is as great an outrage as it is to deny them the right to select their own preachers, and he adds, religious monopoly and medical monopoly must stand or fall together. Medicine was free in the early years of this republic, and progress was possible then in the healing art. But when Dr. Samuel Thomson and his disciples began curing patients all over the country that others could not cure, they went to the legislatures and secured the passage of laws to suppress the botanic quacks.
"The people still believed in freedom, and they rebelled against this, and from 1830 to 1836 no man could be elected to the legislature in any state who was in favor of restrictive medical legislation. The people demanded the repeal of those obnoxious laws and they were wiped from the statutes of every state in the Union. From 1836 until after our civil war the practice of medicine was free in this country, but after the war monopolies of various kinds demanded special laws for their benefit, and army surgeons wanted official positions and wanted protection against competitors, so there has grown up in this country in almost every state a system of political doctors known as Boards of Health, and laws enacted restricting the practice of medicine to such as can get permission to do so from an official Board. These Boards grant permission not upon merit, but only to those who belong to the ring of which they are at the head. It is a species of despotism paralleled nowhere outside of Russia, and as Dr. Rush said of such laws, they are relics of monarchy, vestiges of despotism, and wholly out of harmony with our republican form of government."
