There met together, not long since, several hundred eminent physicians, for the purpose of discussing the curative properties of the new pitchblende discovery, radium; in particular its effect on civilization's "great white plague," consumption. The principal speaker of the evening is an authority in materia medica, as well as a medical practitioner of wide experience. Therefore it is of no little import to have had him preface his thesis as follows: "There is nothing dawning upon the profession to-day with more certainty, than that medicine as a curative agent is passing. The most learned men are depending less and less each year upon drugs as a means of combating disease. The best men in the profession are changing both their views and their practice. For many hundred years consumption has been treated with drugs, and nobody has ever been cured by them." The italics are the writer's, with which to call attention to the signal comprehensiveness of this record. "Nobody has ever been cured by them" marks a failure more appalling than those outside the body medical had appreciated. It admits no solitary proof that perchance the half-gods are come in materia medica, not one example wherewith to show that the leaves of this tree can yield balm to a mortal suffering from this wide-spread disease.
Then why, in all conscience' sake, is not this line of restorative abandoned? How much longer are thinking people to go on blindly trusting themselves to a school of therapeutics that has to its credit in the history of this serious ill "no one" rudimentary proof upon which to establish a scientific curative principle! Right here the question, so wearisomely propounded to Christian Scientists, will be heard, "How do you propose to check this scourge without some such aid?" And suppose we should interrogate the interrogator, "How do you propose to check it with such aid?" But because we are all members, one of another, and the brotherhood that is ours cannot stand defiantly by and see those seekers in the vineyard of honest endeavor burying their talents under a bushel, we answer again, and ever, that the children of the one God have no need of intermediary help in trouble; there is naught so near us as the Father "who healeth all thy diseases."
"No one has ever been cured by them" emphasizes the blind idolatry of a people committed to a curative agency branded with centuries of suffering, sadness, and despair, relieved by "no one" cure to insure it the right to be, and yet respecting the sincerity and worth of the representative practitioner thereof there cannot be two opinions. What class of savants the world over have applied themselves more arduously, or struggled against ghastlier odds, to develop a scientific modus, than have the followers of Hippocrates? We have only to call to mind the several hard-working, self-sacrificing doctors of medicine who have come into our own lives, to be forever disabused of the idea that they are either ignorant or charlatans. Perish the thought! But when, after a trial of thousands of years, their lusty profession lands us on no firmer ground than that cited, does the fact of the personal honesty of the medical man warrant a continuance in this system as a profitable one for a race bent on well-being? However honest the physician, however brilliant his experiments, no individual effort of his can succeed in overcoming an actual inadequacy in the fundamentals of his profession, much less an error in such. If his profession is builded upon a false premise, though the superstructure be hewn of solid heroism and buttressed about with tomes of erudition, it has but to fall. The greater the structure the greater the fall! Truly, to seek to vindicate the healing puissance of material medicine by showing to a waiting world the mighty funeral pyre of noble men and women who have given their lives in this cause, is naive logic. This Goliath of Gath—the drug— is at once the stronghold and the weakness of materia medica; but be it said, in justice to the tireless work of its adherents, that through no effort left untried has its prognosis fallen short of realization; every field of probability, from the toad to the tar–barrel, has been exhaustively vivisected or analyzed. Animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms alike have been reckoned with, till their sum total is awesome to behold as it glowers at one from the pharmacist's shelves. But what is it all about? Drugs are no whit less a belief of yesterday, a straw of to-day, and their future nil.
