Medical practice bills too frequently are drafted by physicians with especial reference to their pecuniary interests, and therefore aim to cover every form of the healing art by putting specifically under legal ban everybody who would regard disease from a standpoint inconsistent with the dicta of regular physicians. The same sort of warfare was made on homoeopaths and eclectics as is now being waged against Christian Scientists, hydropaths, osteopaths, and other forms of healing unconventionalism, but the fight was a losing one from the start.
The Nazarene and his disciples would have fared sadly at the hands of a medical-practice act such as our very righteous medical practitioners are now clamoring for. Against deceit, imposture, knavery, and incompetency in medical practice the law may well be invoked, but every alleged offence must be decided upon its merits and not merely bunched into an arbitrary criminal classification. The chasm between the Christian Science philosophy and Homoeopathy is far less wide and deep than between the homoeopaths and "regulars." The antipathy to other faiths by the militant regular proceeds too often from the same mercenary spirit of intolerance which would forbid the pharmacist recommending the accepted remedies for every-day ailments. The Christian Science people may be a sadly misguided set, but they are, as a rule, people of more than average intelligence, culture, and discrimination, and when a committee of the New York legislature voted against classing them as mere mountebanks on an appeal from a half-thousand sincere and earnest women, the committee spoke for the same spirit of toleration which the conflicting schools of medical practice respectively demand for themselves. In these days of liberality and progress an honest and sincere mind may well bespeak charity for even its most preposterous offspring.
The Western Druggist, Chicago.
