Now that nearly every American legislature has been asked to forbid the practice of Christian Science and has refused, a bill expressly directed against the practice of this religion is seldom introduced. The commonest bill is one usually entitled, "A bill for an act to regulate the practice of medicine." It provides that no one shall practise medicine and surgery in any of its branches without first obtaining a certificate based on a certain course of study, it being the course of study needed for the practice of medicine and surgery. After creating a board to examine applicants and grant or refuse certificates, the bill proceeds to depart from its proclaimed purpose and undertakes to stifle competition. To this end one section of the bill is in the form of a definition of the practice of medicine. As a matter of fact it is a fictitious definition, including what every intelligent man knows is not such practice—if his attention is called to the effect of the language used.
In this legal subterfuge the practice of medicine is defined in terms broad enough to include not only the practice of that system, but the practice of some or all of the other methods which physicians regard as competitive. For example, a bill which actually became a law in one of the United States reads as follows: "Any person who treats or offers to treat diseases of human beings by any system whatsoever is considered to be practising medicine." It is plain that such a definition is a mere trick or artifice. The law which contains it was not designed to regulate the practice of medicine, but to restrict the practice of healing to doctors of medicine. The members of the legislature may not have noticed the full import and effect of their act, but the parties with whom the bill originated undoubtedly did.
In a certain country where the Chinese labor question is an issue, a member of the law-making body introduced the following measure: "Be it enacted, . . . Section 1. It shall be unlawful for any female child under eighteen years of age to conduct or be employed in a laundry. Section 2. For the purpose of this act a Chinaman shall be regarded as a female child under eighteen years of age." This proposed definition of a Chinaman is not more unlike what law should be than are the definitions of medical practice which organized medicine presents to our legislatures; and some of these bills get through the legislatures.
