THE (PROPOSED) MEDICAL REGISTRATION BILL.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE WATER CURE JOURNAL.

MY DEAR SIR,-Although the Medical Registration Bill, which was laid before the late Parliament, was subsequently withdrawn, and although no similar measure has as yet been introduced into the present Parliament, yet, as such a measure is in contemplation, and as its scope and bearing have been made the subject of parliamentary investigation, and are continually being discussed in the medical journals, I beg to offer a few observations on some of the provisions which it is contended ought to form part of any such

measure.

The contemplated provisions of the proposed Bill have hitherto been discussed as if they only concerned the medical profession, and in nowise interested the public, which appears to be looked upon as if only created for the especial benefit of that learned body. But in reality those provisions challenge the most jealous scrutiny on the part of the public, as will become apparent by a glance at a few of them. It is proposed that there shall be a registration of medical practitioners, excluding from the registry every practitioner not licensed by one of the British medical corporations; and further, that the name of any practitioner guilty of the vague crime of “any unprofessional conduct," shall be struck off the Registry; and still further-and this is the most important feature of the contemplated measure that any unregistered person who shall practise medicine or surgery, no matter what may be the result of his practice, shall be liable, for every time he shall so offend, to summary conviction before a magistrate, to be followed by fine or imprisonment.

It is clear that a measure so harassing in its details must speedily suppress all nonconformity in medical doctrines and practice. The first thing that calls for condemnation is the illiberality which, while the various barriers between the different races of man are being daily swept away, would interpose a new barrier to exclude from practice, in this boasted land of freedom, the foreign physician or surgeon, no matter what may be his attainments, or with what discovery he may have enriched science.

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The proposal to confer a power to expunge from the registry the name of a practitioner, for so vague a crime as any unprofessional conduct," likewise demands unqualified reprobation, inasmuch as it is a proposal to create a machinery which might be vexatiously employed to repel any innovation on the established practice of

medicine, and to crush the future Jenners, Harveys, or other obnoxious reformers.

But those portions of the proposed Bill which call for the utmost censure, and provoke the most unyielding opposition, are the clauses which justly entitle it to the designation of a bill of pains and penalties. I apprehend that there are but few persons who will seriously contest the manifest right of every citizen of a free state to pursue any honourable calling he pleases, whether it require the labour of the hands or of the head; and surely, if there be any such things as natural rights, every man has an unmistakeable right to be the conservator of his own health, or, if it shall be lost, to seek its recovery at whatever hands, and through whatever means, his judgment shall approve. So firmly do I hold the indestructibility of these rights, that strong as is my faith in the superior efficacy of the water-cure-and although as strongly believing that the old practice has slain its thousands by pill and lancet-and although earnestly desirous that this my creed should obtain universal acceptance—yet, if it were possible to win a majority to adopt it, and it were proposed to take advantage of this circumstance to crush the allopathic practice and practitioner by the penalties of the law, I would resist, as now, to the best of my ability, any such measure as an impertinent interference with the natural rights of others, and the establishment of an odious tyranny. No man is justified in attempting to force upon another his peculiar scientific notions, any more than his religious opinions. If the layman who may be in search of health is incapable of exercising a sound judgment on his own behalf in matters which so closely concern him, upon whom can he rely to decide for him between the claims of rival systems and rival practitioners? Does the fact of a man's being elected to serve in Parliament endue him with such wisdom that in his legislative capacity he can clearly see how to decide for others in matters in which by such interference he confesses that as a private individual he is incompetent to decide for himself? Or can the solution of the question be prudently left to the decision of the ministers of one of the rival sects, who have such a manifest interest in deciding in their own favour?

The Medical Registration Bill is advocated under the specious. pretence of being a measure devised for the protection of the public; but does any portion of the public demand or need this protection? Clearly not. It will not be argued that the partisans of the still prevailing sect, for the benefit of whose ministers this

measure is designed, need the protection of the law; and it is not pretended that medical dissenters petition for legislative interference to force them back to the adoption of the faith from which they have seceded. Is it true that Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen, are such idiots that they cannot be trusted to determine for themselves in these matters-matters in which each man has as much right to the exercise of a free choice as he has to choose between white and brown bread? Does science indeed need to be fenced round with pains and penalties which even religious fanaticism would now blush to enforce? In science, as in religion, men will claim to think for themselves; but they have no more right in the one case than in the other to attempt to force their opinions upon others. How poor must be the pretensions of modern science, if indeed it requires to be robed in the cast-off garments of religious bigotry! Persecution never benefited the cause which it was employed to uphold. In America there are no prohibitory laws, and surely science does not languish there. The true way to put down quacks and quackery, whether within or without the profession, is to enlighten the people-to make the study of the human frame, and of the laws which govern it in health and disease, a part of every schoolboy's education.

How often has a common itinerant quack saved the life of a patient, when the titled ministers of science had consulted and prescribed in vain! I knew a patient who had been given over by several eminent medical men, and who, through the skill and science of an Irish peasant, had been rescued from impending death, to live thereafter during a period of over thirty years. Now, if this Medical Registration Bill had been in force in those days, that peasant, instead of having been liberally rewarded as he deservedly was, would have been liable to prosecution, and fine or imprisonment, for having saved a life.

I might rest here, in my opposition to this bill of pains and penalties, but that when such extravagant powers are demanded for any body of men, it provokes inquiry into the merits of that body as a public institution, and into the demerits of those the sacrifice of whom is required.

"The practice of physic," says Dr. Heberden, “has been more improved by the casual experiments of illiterate nations, and by the rash ones of vagabond quacks, than by the reasonings of all the once celebrated professors of it, and theoretic teachers of the several schools of Europe, very few of whom have furnished us

with one new medicine, or have taught us better how to use our old ones, or have in any one instance at all improved the art of curing disease." If this be so, does it not prompt a suspicion that the "vagabonds" have been the real men of science, and the recognised practitioners the quacks? For, what is quackery? It is defined by one author to be "boasting pretences, or base practices, especially in medicine." Another author writes: " That system is quackery wherein the direful consequences of remedies are overlooked in the attempt at immediate and transient relief! That system is quackery which proceeds on the principle of producing a drug-disease in lieu of the accidental one! That system is quackery, wherein, as is well known, many physicians and apothecaries play into each other's hands, to the detriment of the patient's person and pocket, the one prescribing to suit the other's bill, which again regulates the calling in of the prescriber! Begotten of mystery and ignorance, quackery owns impudence, insincerity, and extortion for its sponsors, and the whole family of quacks fatten in the garden of drug medication!"

And what return have the members of this profession made to those, whether regular or irregular, practitioners, who have brought the most valuable additions to our stock of medical knowledge? Invoke the memories of the dead, and mark the replies. Harvey was styled the "circulator," and persecuted throughout life. Parè, who first tied up the arteries after amputation, was "hooted and howled down by the faculty of physic, who ridiculed the idea of hanging human life upon a thread, when boiling pitch had stood the test of centuries." The quack, Paracelsus, first employed antimony-the French Parliament passed a law making it penal to prescribe it. A poor Indian discovered the use of bark; the Jesuits introduced it into England, and it was denounced as the invention of the devil. Dr. Groenwelt first employed cantharides internally, and "no sooner did his cures begin to make a noise, than he was at once committed to Newgate by warrant of the President of the College of Physicians." Lady Montague's "rank, sex, beauty, and genius," did not preserve her from persecution; and Jenner was refused a license to practise his profession in London. And in our own days we have seen a Priessnitz condemned to imprisonment. Such are the rewards ever adjudged to reformers; while those who revile, proscribe, and persecute them, quietly seize on their several discoveries, and appropriate them to their own uses.

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Let us now inquire in what degree of estimation that profession, which it is proposed to endow with such extraordinary power and privileges, was held by some of the most distinguished of its own members. Dr. Paris says, The file of every apothe cary would furnish a volume of instances where the ingredients of the prescription were fighting together in the dark." Dr. J. Johnson says, "I declare it to be my most conscientious opinion, that if there were not a single physician, or surgeon, or apothecary, or man-midwife, or chemist, or druggist, or drug in the world, there would be less mortality amongst mankind than there is now." Dr. Billing says, "I visited the different schools of medicine, and the students of each hinted, if they did not assert, that the other sects killed their patients." Franks says, Thousands are slaughtered in the quiet sick room." Reid says, "More infantile subjects are perhaps diurnally destroyed by the mortar and pestle, than in the ancient Bethlehem fell victims in one day to the Herodian massacre." Speaking of the plague, Dr. Madden says, "In all our cases we did as other practitioners did -we continued to bleed, and the patients continued to die." And who does not remember Sir A. Cooper's famous declaration, that "the science of medicine was founded on conjecture, and improved by murder?"

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Dr. Brown said that he "wasted more than twenty years in learning, teaching, and diligently scrutinizing every part of medi cine." Knighton said, "Medicine seems one of those ill-fated arts whose improvement bears no proportion to its antiquity." Gregory pronounced that "Medical doctrines are little better than stark staring absurdities." Abernethy said, "There has been a great increase of medical men of late years, but, upon my life, diseases have increased in proportion." Baillie declared that he "had no faith whatever in medicine." And, not to multiply quotations too far, Dr. Dickson says, "Locke, Smollet, Goldsmith, (all three physicians) held their art in contempt;" and, elsewhere, "Sir J. Mackintosh was not the only man who left it (the profession of physic) in disgust; Crabbe, Davy, Lord Langdale, and hundreds of others have done the same; and again, "The ancients endeavoured to elevate physic to the dignity of a science, but failed. The moderns, with more success, have endeavoured to reduce it to the level of a trade." The same writer gives, on the authority of Dr. Fosbroke, a case in point: "I saw a farmer last summer come into a druggist's shop. Some one had told him