“ ETERNAL VIGILANCE IS THE FRICE OF LIBERTY.” 
THE 
WAR OF THE DOCTORS 
ON 
THE EIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE. 
Arguments and Addresses in Remonstrance Thereof, 
DELIVERED BEFORE THE MASSACHUSETTS LEGISLATIVE 
Committee on Public Health, at the State 
House, Boston, February, 1880, 
BY 
Alfred E. Giles, Allen Putnam, Edward Hamilton, Richard 
Holmes, Lorlng Moody, A. S. Hayward, Joshua 
Sye, and Prof. Charles Wesley Emerson. 
SECOND EDITION. 
BOSTON : 
COLBY & RICH, 
No. 9 Montgomery Place. 
1881. PREFATORY. 
In the Massachusetts Legislature—Session of 1880—was presented 
the petition of Eohert Treat Paine, jr., and others, Committee of 
Health Department of American Social Science Association, also 
of certain other citizens, for an act to “ prevent all persons from 
practicing any branch of medicine in this State except such persons 
as have furnished to the authorities of the State sufficient evidence 
of good moral character and of the possession of a thorough knowl- 
edge of their duty and calling.” Remonstrances of many citizens 
against the petition were also presented. The petition and remon- 
strances were referred for investigation and report to the Committee 
on Public Health. That Committee gave several public hearings to 
parties and their counsel interested in favor of or against said peti- 
tion. ARGUMENT OF ALFRED E. GILES. 
Me. Giles said that he came before the Legislative Com- 
mittee on Public Health in behalf of certain remonstrant* 
against the petition of Robert Treat Paine, jr., and others. 
Committee of Health Department of American Social Sci- 
ence Association. He desired to state some reasons in be- 
half of Spiritualists, clairvoyants, spiritual mediums, sensi- 
tives, healing mediums and magnetic healers, why “ A pro- 
posed Act to regulate the practice of medicine in Massachu- 
setts ” should not be enacted. He believed that to the greater 
part of th e Regular medical profession, and to m any of the best 
citizens of the State, the names and avocations of Spiritual 
mediums, clairvoyants, Healing mediums and magnetic heal- 
ers were known only as terms of reproach. He therefore 
thought it was proper he should refer to their origin in this 
country, and briefly to mention the therapeutic principle 
which guided them in their medical prescriptions and their 
methods in the treatment of disease, which he believed was 
almost unknown to the larger part of the certificated prac- 
titioners of the regular schools of medicine. 
About the Ist of December, 1843, in the State of Hew York,! 
a Poughkeepsie shop-boy of seventeen years of age was mes- 
merized. He was a kind-hearted, truthful youth, not quick- 
witted, in fact was considered as rather slow and dull in his' 
mental capacity. His educational acquirements were the 
reading, writing and ciphering accomplishments, which he* 
had picked up during five months’ attendance at country 
schools. After being mesmerized, and while under its influ- 
ence, he became clairvoyant. He could see through opaque’ 
substances, through wood partitions, and solid brick walls,; 
and to vast distances—over hundreds of miles. These are! 
facts, and are well authenticated, and their evidence is ini 
the Spiritualist literature of the d-w. 
He also discovered that while in the clairvoyant state he| 
could see into the interior of the living human body, and be- 
hold the workings of all its organs. He there saw the causes 
of the sickness and disease that afflicted many people. He 
made known his knowledge to bis friends, and suggested to 
them appropriate remedies, not common in the medical 6 
CIYIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY 
schools, for their complaints. They tried those remedies, 
and invariably were benefited. His fame spread. He be- 
came known as the Poughkeepsie seer. For about two years 
following his first mesmeric experience this uneducated 
and undiplomated youth devoted himself almost daily, for 
two hours a day, to clairvoyant examinations, and to pre- 
scribing remedies, generally very simple ones, never min- 
eral, or metallic, or violent ones, to the many patients who 
came to him for relief. During his clairvoyant medical 
period, young Davis actually cubed nearly three thousand 
old chronic cases of almost every imaginable disease, from 
internal cancer to elephantiasis, cases which had been given 
up as incurable by very distinguished medical gentlemen 
and diplomated graduates of the medical schools. About 
the same number of patients, though not cured, were greatly 
helped and made comfortable through his treatment. No 
patient ever died from disease while under his clairvoyant 
treatment. What was the principle that guided him in 
his administration of remedies ? What was the secret of 
his wonderful success? He has stated it in his auto- 
biography, for he has written it under the title of “The 
Magic Staff,” and he himself, Andeew Jackson Davis, is 
known through his many published works to thousands and 
hundreds of thousands of intelligent people in America, 
Europe and Asia, and in the islands of the sea: yet the 
earnest and enthusiastic young Regular physician. Dr. E. A. 
Cushing, of the Boston City Hospital, who has been conspicu- 
ous this winter in committee rooms and lobbies of the S'Ale 
House for his zeal in pressing the proposed medical bill upon 
the attention of the legislators, told me last week, and again 
to-day, in the presence of this committee, and of this audience, 
that he had never before then heard of the name of Andrew 
Jackson Davis. He has also here publicly stated, in answer 
to my question, that the Regular Medical School “ have no 
theory of disease, that is to say, no exclusive theory.” Of 
course, it is probable that many of the Regular School phy- 
sicians, especially those who have never heard of Andrew 
Jackson Davis, nor read his medical works, are unacquainted 
with the principles of his philosophy of Health, Disease and 
Healing. Disease is discord. Andrew Jackson Davis per- 
ceived and revealed to the world that disease originates in 
a want of equilibrium in the circulation of the Spiritual prin- 
ciple through the organism, that what the medical faculty 
call diseases, are but evidences of constitutional or spiritual 
disturbances—and that vital magnetism and electricity are 
the divine (not moral) elements of spiritual nourishment, 
and are the mediums through which the spirit acts upon the 
body; and that to restore harmony or health, the prime- 
moving principle in the body must be addressed by and 
through identical mediums or elements with itself.—I. Great 
Harmonia, pp. 144-213, 
After an experience of two years in using his clairvoyant 
powers for medical examinations and remedies, young Davis 
removed from Poughkeepsie to the city of New York. There, 
while in the trance state, or what he calls the “superior 
condition,’’ induced by mesmerism, he delivered one hun- 
dred and fifty-seven lectures before many witnesses, and in IX THE HEALING ART. 
7 
a room open to all persons who might desire to hear them. 
These lectures have been published, and are entitled “The 
Principles of Nature, her Divine Revelations,” and fill a 
large octavo volume of near eight hundred pages. The first 
lecture was delivered November 28th, 1845, when this unlet- 
teied youth, uncertiflcated and unlicensed by any board of 
medical registration, was scarcely nineteen' years of age, 
and the last lecture on January 27th, 1847, not six months 
after he had attained to the age of twenty-one years. 
This great volume treats of the Origin and Structure of 
the Univerceelum ; of the Solar System ; of the Origin and 
Geological History of the Earth; of the Early History of 
Man: of the Origin of Language; of Mythology, and The- 
ology, and of the Spirit-World. On p. 675 is a statement and a 
prophecy, viz.: “It is a truth that spirits commune with 
one another while one is in the body and the other in the 
higher spheres—and this, too, when the person in the body is 
unconscious of the influx, and hence cannot be convinced of 
the fact; and this truth will ere long present itself in the form 
of a living demonstration.” The si atement is, that it is a truth 
that the spirits of the so-called dead do commune with the 
spirits of persons yet clothed upon with mortal bodies ; the 
prophecy is, that this truth will ere long present itself in 
the form of a living demonstration. Was this prophecy ful- 
filled? Let me answer: 
In Hydesville,-N. Y., John D. Fox. a respectable farmer, 
lived with bis family. From about the middle of December, 
1847, to the last of March, 1848, frequent knockings, rappings 
and noises were heard in his house. Neither he nor any of 
his family, though they often sought for their cause,‘could 
discover it. On the night of March 31st, 1848, his two chil- 
dren, Kate Fox and Margaret Fox, the one aged nine, and 
the other twelve years, heard the raps apparently near their 
bed. Kate attempted to imitate the sound by snapping her 
fingers. To her surprise the same number of raps respond- 
ed from an invisible source. She clapped with her hands 
six times. Six raps followed from an invisible rapper, as if 
in response to her six clappings. Further experiments fol- 
lowed. The family repeated those experiments. Neighbors 
made them. Strangers hearing of the wonder also came 
and experimented. Some people said that spirits caused 
those raps; others that they were produced by the toe- 
joints; others that concealed machinery or legerdemain 
effected them. At that place, Hydesville, N. Y., and on 
that night, March 31st, 1848, when it appeared that the in- 
visible source of those mystic raps was possessed of intelli- 
gence, and could hear and respond to questions proposed to 
it, Modern Spiritualism was born. From that time to this 
it has grown in wisdom and strength among those who are 
best acquainted with it. It has many adherents, and it has 
a literature. Among those who have received it, it has de- 
veloped freedom of thought, and has enlarged their sphere 
of observation. True it is, it has modified the views and 
theories which they held on many subjects before they were 
convinced and satisfied that the life beyond, a spirit life, 
is intimately associated and commingled, as it were, with 
this external and every-day life of man in the body. To 8 
CIVIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY 
some extent it has changed their religious or theological 
views and theories. Conseiwative clergymen and supporters 
of the ancient theologies mourn over the defection of Spir- 
itualists from their churches, and from standard catechisms 
and articles of faith. Spiritualism has withdrawn its adhe- 
rents from the medical and remedial views and practices 
that they once entertained, which they had acquired from 
the physicians of the Regular or other established schools of 
medicine, and substituted other, milder and less harmful 
medicines and agencies in their stead. Spiritualists are not 
apt to use medicines of a mineral or metallic base. They 
dislike calomel, and drastic cathartics, and heroic doses, and 
vaccine virus, and hullet-sized pills, and unknown prescrip- 
tions written in astrologic symbols, and in a language they 
cannot read. 
They prefer milder remedies—simple herbs, human mag- 
netism, homeopathic pills, and gentle application of the elec- 
tric current. They seek to know the occult laws of Nature, 
and to apply its principles in their daily life, in their food 
and drink, in their avocation, their sleep and their recrea- 
tions. They dislike the old school theology, but not its min- 
isters ; they love not the old school medicine, though they 
respect its practitioners. They want neither the Regular, 
nor the Homeopathic, nor the Eclectic, nor any other sys- 
tem of medicine, except their own. No one can tell exactly 
where the shoe pinches except its wearer. Many Spiritual- 
ists don’t like the Regular Medical shoe, nor the Homeo- 
pathic shoe, nor the Eclectic shoe. They prefer to buy their 
own shoes adapted to their own feet, and their medicines 
and prescriptions adapted to their constitutions, where they 
please to buy them. Why should the Legislature enact a 
law to prevent them from doing so, either in respect to their 
shoes or their medicines or prescriptions? Least of all do 
Spiritualists and Liberalists ask for any system or school of 
medicine registered or not registered by medical certifiers, 
to be coerced upon themselves or upon their neighbors, by 
legislative enactment. 
It has appeared in the discussions before the Committee 
that the different schools of medicine have dissimilar sys- 
tems of therapeutics i.e., different means and methods 
of treating disease. The Allopathic physician has an allo- 
Eathic system. Homeopaths use homeopathic remedies in 
omeopathic doses. Eclectics select means and modes of 
cure from all systems except from the Harmonial system 
taught by Andrew Jackson Davis and practiced by Spirit- 
ualists and mediums. These different systems of therapeu- 
tics differ each one from all the other systems. Therefore 
it is that the third section of the proposed Act does not 
require an examination in therapeutics of an applicant for 
a license, but permits every licensee to use his own system 
of therapeutics. But many Spiritualists, clairvoyants, mag- 
netic physicians and healing and spiritual mediums, use a 
system of therapeutics peculiar to themselves. It is not 
allopathic, nor homeopathic, nor eclectic, in the meaning of 
that school. It is what I may here term lire Harmonial or 
Spiritualistic method of treating disease. It cures or benefits 
its patients. They like it. The Allopaths do not know it, IN THE HEALING ART. 
and cannot comprehend it any more readily than they 
can understand homeopathy. Homeopaths do not know it, 
though they approximate to it. Eclectics do not know it. 
But Spiritualists know it, though some of them may not 
readily explain it. Mediums know of it and practice it; and 
students of the Harmonial Philosophy more or less under- 
stand it. Now I ask, by what principle of law, right, truth, 
justice, equity or mercy, are Spiritualists, clairvoyants, heal- 
ing, medical, magnetic and spiritual mediums, to be prohib- 
ited iu Massachusetts from practicing their own systems of 
therapeutics, their own means and methods of relieving 
themselves and others of sickness? And why should they 
and all the rest of the community be corapelied to submit, 
in case of sickness, to the therapeutics of one or the other 
of the three incorporated medical schools ? The enactment 
of the proposed Bill might draw students to the incorporated 
medical schools, fees to their professors, and additional prac- 
tice to registered licensees, but, as I believe, would multiply 
diseases, increase mortality, and tarnish the good name of 1 he 
State. There were righteous Hebrews in the time of Daniel 
who regarded not the decree of Nebuchadnezzar nor the 
statutes of King Darius, and I doubt not there are conscien- 
tious, God-loving, God-serving people, descendants of the 
Pilgrims, yet living in Massachusetts. 
Probably not a veteran Regular practitioner’, nor any 
recent graduate of the Harvard Medical School, or of the 
Homeopathic College, nor any physician who under this pro- 
posed Act would be likely to be appointed on the Board of 
Medical Registration, understands or appreciates the philos- 
ophy of health and disease, as presented and illustrated by 
Andrew Jackson Davis in his books entitled “The Phy- 
sician.” “ The Harbinger of Health,” “Diseases of the Brain 
and Nerves,” and “Spirit Mysteries Explained” booxs 
which are in thousands of families in this Commonwealth, 
and whose doctrines are the basis of the successful treat- 
ment administered by thousands of physicians, mediums and 
healers throughout the United States. 
Spiritualists believe, and have evidence that will bear the 
closest scrutiny, to believe, that oftentimes the spirits of 
the so-called dead associate, sympathize with, and assist 
themselves and their fellow-men and women, yet living in 
bodies of flesh, when they are iu trouble and sickness. I 
have had experience thereof in my own life- history. I have 
alluded to the uniform success that accompanied young An- 
drew Jackson Davis’s prescriptions for his patients—to his 
theory of disease, and philosophy of healing. Whence 
that theory and philosophy, and whence that success? Is 
not the cprestion answered, when one learns that Davis had 
for a friend and counsellor, Galen, the celebrated Greek 
physician of the second century of the Christian Era, whose 
name is honored in medical schools ? That fact Davis fully 
and distinctly states in bis Autobiography on pp. 238-248, and 
furthermore confirms it in his book entitled “Diseases of 
the Drain and Nerves,” published 1871, on page 52, where he 
states that he has seen Galen at least once a year since 1853, 
and that on August 11th, 1871, Galen gave to him a brief 
message, which is there printed, and which all persons whc 
desire may there read. CIVIL AST) MEDICAL LIBERTY 
10 
Other Spiritualists and mediums besides Mr. Davis declare 
and believe that they are assisted ixx their avocations by 
disembodied spirits. The truth of such declarations can be 
tested only by experience or investigation. Opposing sneers, 
opprobrious epithets and contemptuous expressions, though 
often cast upon, do not destroy the truth, but do delay the 
knowledge of it among men. Some of these mediums pro- 
fess to have the gift of healing by the laying oxx of haxxds, 
and others assert their gift or power of prescribing healing 
remedies for the maladies of their patients. Those pre- 
scriptions, so far as I know, are usually very simple, harm- 
less px'epax-ations; never, or scarcely ever, ax:e they perturb- 
ing medicines. A very remarkable spirit xnedium, Mrs. 
Cora L. V. Richmond, has for the last six weeks beep lec- 
tux-ing .every Sunday in Boston. Spiritualists believe that 
her lectures arc prompted or inspired by spirits. She some- 
times pxescx’ibes medicines for friends ixx their sicknesses. 
It is said and believed that her spirit physician is the cele- 
brated Dr. Rush, formexdy of Philadelphia. 
Ocher mediums also have, as they themselves declare and 
as their patients believe, spirit guides, counselloi’s and 
physicians to assist them in ministering to, and prescribing 
for patients, sick pex-sons, and sorrowful applicants for 
strength and comfort. 
Now this state of things is not pleasant to medical practi- 
tioners of the Old School, nor to some apothecaries who deal 
in the Old School x-emedies. Their prescriptions are not 
sought for nor their drugs bought as lax-gely, especially by 
Spiritualists and reformers, as they formerly were bought; 
Spirit physicians do not prescribe stxychnine nor arsenic 
nor chloi’al, nor even less poisonous medicines, in the heroic 
doses which they may have administered prior to their en- 
tering into spirit-life. In the Banner of Light, a Spiritualist 
paper publislxed in Boston, in its issue of March 10th, 1877, is 
the following communication from spirit physician Dr. 
Shute, formerly of Hingham. It came through the medium 
who then occupied the platform in the Banner of Light Cix- 
cle-Roora, which, as it ever has been, is now free to all in- 
quirex-s and investigators, and was addressed to the audience 
there present. The spirit physician, Dr. Shute, says, “Best 
assure 1, my fxdends, I never would give one pax’ticle of the 
medicine I gave when I was here. I ignore it completely, 
and think it a fallacy from beginning to end, and only fit to 
be put on the pages of the dark ages. Hex’e, finding that 
there is such a thing as xnagnetism and electricity, I find 
that medicine need not be measured out in the largest 
spoons, but ean be given in the most minute paxdicles.” 
But it may be asked by an astonished honest person hear- 
ing now of these marvels for the first time, “Are these 
things really so?” “Do any regularly educated physicians 
believe that clairvoyants and spirit mediums can success- 
fully prescribe for human maladies, or that the spirits of de- 
ceased physicians do actually prescribe effective remedies ?” 
Yes, I answer; I know of Allopathic and Homeopathic 
and Eclectic physicians who do so believe, and I have their 
letters to that effect. Some of these physicians, practicing 
in Massachusetts, are unwilling that their names should be IN THE HEALING ART. 
11 
mentioned in this connection, because they say such men- 
tion might tend to break up their pleasant association and 
relation with their medical societies and their professional 
brethren. I will therefore give evidence to the same point 
from well-known physicians out of the State who have 
never bowed the knee to the Massachusetts Medical Society. 
Dr. Eugene Crowell, of Brooklyn, N. Y., is widely known 
through his volumes entitled “ Identify of Primitive Chris- 
tianity and Modern Spiritualism,” and by his pamphlet, 
“Spiritualism and Insanity,” in which he completely de- 
monstrated the error of the statements of Medical Dr. L. S. 
Forbes Winslow, of London, and Bev. Dr. Talmage, of 
Brooklyn, that Spiritualism especially tended to promote in- 
sanity. Here is Dr. Crowell’s letter: 
Brooklyn, N. Y., 19G Clinton Avenue, Feb. 1 Mh, 1880. 
Alfred E. Giles, Esq.: My Dear Friend—ln reply to yours of 
the 12th hist., I would say that t nmC2 years of age ; practiced medi- 
cine for twelve years in New York; was a regular allopathic physi- 
cian; received the diploma of a Doctor of Medicine from the Medical 
Department of the University of the City of New York in March. 1842. 
At one time ! might have favored a proposition to restrict medical 
practice to the regular practitioners of certain schools, but a larger 
experience, andespecially an acquaintance with Modern Spiritualism, 
have niodilled.my previous views, and now I am decidedly in favor 
of medical freedom. 
I have had abundant and conclusive evidence convincing me that 
the spirits of deceased physicians have frequently through sensitives 
or mediums given medical advice and prescribed effective remedies, 
and in a number of instances I have personally known of the prog- 
nosis given through these instrumentalities to be verified where all 
the symptoms pointed to different and opposite results. 
Nine years since, the health of my wife failed, and I resorted to 
every means which suggested itself to my mind and to the minds of 
my medical brethren,hn order to restore her to health, but without 
avail until, as a last resort, and as an experiment, T employed a heal- 
ing medium, or magnetic doctor, and tbe.effects of tho+reatmentwere 
sut prising, for she soon improved ; and since then, now nearly eight 
years, she has depended upon this treatment for the renewal of her 
exhausted vitality. The good effects of every treatment have been 
apparent to her friends and family. 
I know a number of regular physicians in this vicinity who have as 
much faith in this mode of treatment as I have, and I know two who 
personally employ the magnetic healer here spoken of. 
Icouldsaymuch.more, and relate some startling facts in corrobora- 
tion of what I have here said, but I will conclude with the remark 
that I earnestly hope such a bill as the one now before your Legisla- 
ture, will not pass that body, and the time is now not far distant when 
the faculty will work in perfect harmony with their unrecognized but 
equally useful co-laborers, the magnetic healers. 
Most truly yours, Eggexe Crowell.* 
Now why is it proposed to restrict the practice of medi- 
cine in this Commonwealth? And why does a Committee 
of the Social Science Association cooperate with the diplo- 
mated doctors to that end? To the first question this an- 
swer suggests itself to my mind, viz.: There is not sufficient 
medical practice to comfortably support nil the diplomated 
physicians who rely upon their profession for their support. 
In the opening article of the New York MrrVr.al Tribune for 
December, 1879, p. 50, the writer says: “ There exists no 
• Vid letter to the same point, of Prof. Jos. E. Buchanan, M. D., page 33. CIVIL AITO MEDICAL LIBERTY 
need or desire among the people for any of this extraordi- 
nary medical legislation. It would never have been asked for 
but for the exigencies of the men who are to receive bene- 
fit. The civil war gave employment to an army of surgeons 
who were returned to private life at the close, and are una- 
ble now to gain lucrative practice.” 
To the second question. Why does a Committee of the So- 
cial Science Association give the sanction of its name to the 
1 voposed Doctors’ Bill ? The reason, as it appears to me, is 
that the doctors having failed last year, and the year before 
that, when in the name of the Massachusetts Medical So- 
ciety they attempted to secure a legislative act to restrict 
medical practice to diploraated doctors, now renew their 
effort under another name, through another agency, but 
for the same end. Many regular and diplomated doc- 
tors are members of the Social Science Association. They 
are the parties, as I believe, who there initiated this diplo- 
mated and certificated doctors’ crusade. Warned by the ex- 
perience of the last two years, they do not now appear di- 
rectly as petitioners, but have persuaded, as I think, some of 
their associates who are not doctors, to give the sanction and 
influence of their names as petitioners. This proposed act 
if it had been circulated among the signers of the Social Sci- 
ence petition "would not, as 1 believe,Tiave received a thou- 
sandth part of its signatures. The to that petition 
I surmise, did not dream of the now manifest plot of the 
chartered Medical School doctors to monopolize to them- 
selves the medical practice of the State. “Committee of the 
Social Science Association ” is the figurehead, but in this 
matter the doctors, as I believe, are behind it, and engineer 
its movements. It is worse than Monsieur Tonson come 
again in a new guise. The ancient and wise Hermes coun- 
selled, “Be wary in thy speech, oh son, and not deceived in 
the names of things.” J. R. Lowell, one of our poets, has 
written; 
“ Let us speak plain; there is more force in names 
Than most men dream of; and a lie may keep 
Its throne a whole age longer, if it skulk 
Behind the shield of some fair seeming name.” 
Let me ask your attention to the petition of the Commit- 
tee of the Health Department of American Social Science 
Association before you. Many petitioners have signed it. 
They have signed that, petition. They have not petitioned for 
the proposed Act now before you to regulate the practice of 
medicine. That proposed Act is probably mostly the work 
of the young doctors whom you have here seen so zealously 
working for its support. You see in its eleventh section 
it declares that: 
“ Sect. 11. Any person who shall practice or shall in any manner 
publicly offer or advertise to practice medicine or dentistry within 
the Commonwealth, without being duly licensed or authorized 
thereto, as herein provided, shall be punished by fine not exceeding 
five hundred dollars.” 
Let us now examine the petition of the Social Science As- 
sociation. If what it prays for be inexpedient or impracti- 
cable, you will, notwithstanding that it bears the names of 
many most excellent citizens, not recommend its adoption; IN THE HEALING ART.) 
13 
That petition consists of four matters or statements in its 
preamble, and an inference or conclusion. Its first two 
statements, viz : that boards of health must receive certifi- 
cates of death from any physician, and that the professional 
actions of physicians are of extreme importance, I will not 
now examine. They are here of no special importance. The 
thii’d statement is, that it is notorious that very many so- 
called physicians, who ai’e ignorant of medicine, or unscru- 
pulous, or both, are practicing in Massachusetts, to the great 
harm and loss of the sick, and to the frequent injury or ruin 
of young men and women.” To which I answer that, whether 
that statement be true or not, (and I do not believe it) it is 
equally notorious that many citizens believe that vei'y many 
diplomated physicians, especially young graduates of the so- 
called Regular Medical Schools, are especially ignorant of 
that branch of medicine known as Therapeutics (or the appli- 
cation of remedies and cure of disease) and are practicing in 
Massachusetts, to the greatharm and loss of the sick persons 
who ax-e committed to their care. A Regular doctor or a grad- 
uate of any medical school may pass examination and be cer- 
tified and registei'ed as acquainted with anatomy, physiol- 
ogy, pathological anatomy, pathology, chemistry, the action 
of poisons, surgery, midwifery, medical diagnosis and medi- 
cal jurisprudence, and yet be more ignorant of therapeu- 
tics, or the application of proper remedies for the cure of 
disease, than many an undiplomated physician, than many 
a magnetic healer, than many a spiritual and healing medi- 
um, than many a nurse and many loving old mothers, sis- 
ters and women, such as may be found in every village, town 
and city of the Commonwealth. Yet the proposed bill to 
regulate medicine does not exclude these young diplomated 
Regulars fi’om practice. In fact it is so drawn as to admit 
suclx ones to practice, while it carefully excludes the genu- 
ine healers whose chief qualification is their knowledge of 
spiritual or harmonial therapeutics. Such an enactment, I 
believe, would largely increase the death statistics of the 
State and work great sickness and woe among our citizens. 
Do the Regular faculty, do physicians who administer al- 
lopathic drxxgs and medicines, by such ministrations pro- 
mote the health of our citizens? Let the elder members 
of the profession answer. Here is their testimony. 
Dr. Jacob Bigelow, formerly President of the Massachu- 
setts Medical Society, in his “Expositions of Rational Medi- 
cine,” says : “ I sincerely believe that the unbiased opinion 
of most medical men of sound judgment and long experi- 
ence is, that the amount of death and disaster in the world 
woxxld be less than it now is, if all disease were left to itself.” 
“The disgrace of medicine,” says Dr. Oliver Wendell 
Holmes, now Professor of Anatomy in the Medical School 
of Harvard Univex-sity, in his “Border Lines of Knowl- 
edge,” p. 70, “has been that colossal system of self-decep- 
tion, in obedience to which mines have been emptied of 
their cankering minerals, the entrails of animals taxed for 
their impurities, the poison-bags of reptiles drained of their 
venom, and all the inconceivable abomination thus obtain- 
ed thrxxst down the throats of human beings suffering from 
some fault of organization, nourishment or vital stimula- 
tion.” 14 
CIYIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY 
Sir William Hamilton, in his “ Discussions on Philosophy,” 
p. 638, remarks ; “ The history of medicine, on the one hand, 
is nothing less than a history of variations; and on the other, 
only a still more marvelous history of how every successive 
variation has by medical bodies been furiously denounced, 
and then bigotedly adopted.” 
Probably it has not yet passed from your recollection that 
Charles O’Conor, the eminent lawyer of New York, was, 
some four or five years ago, when very sick, given up by his 
attending physicians to die. They had exhausted their skill 
and their remedies upon him without any apparent benefit. 
But he was, as I have been informed, restored to health by 
the “ laying on of hands.” The New York Times of May 4th, 
1878, thus pleasantly comments on Mr. O’Conor’s recovery 
and continued health: 
“ Charles O’Conor is still a living monument of the fallibility of 
the opinion of doctors of medicine, and it Is said that they have never 
quite forgiven him for thoroughly recovering two or three years ago 
from a complication of diseases which they solemnly declared (the 
ablest of them agreeing on this point) must of necessity prove fatal. 
Respect for the medical profession should have prompted him to 
withdraw from the world permanently, and his stubbornness in con- 
tinuing to live, in the face of the most learned diagnoses, has natu- 
rally incurred their displeasure. After he got up and out from his 
late illness many of the phsicians comforted themselves—profession- 
ally, we mean—that he could not contradict their predictions more 
than a few weeks at most. And yet. now, at seventy-four, he is as 
healthy and vigorous as he has been for eight or ten years, and bids 
fair to be an octogenarian at least. Some doctors think that he is 
living from pure malice toward them, but he Is living because he pre- 
fers to, and because he still has a good deal of unfinished work be- 
fore him. When questioned, as he often is, as to the cause of his un- 
expected recovery, he laughingly ascribes it to his unwillingness to 
take the prescriptions given him by the M. D.s, and malignantly al- 
lows his questioners to draw an inference that would naturally exas- 
perate the whole medical faculty.” 
At this present date (February, 1880,) Mr. O’Conor yet 
continues in good health, and the New York papers of a 
month ago rumored his expected marriage. 
The eminent Dr, Joseph R. Buchanan, of Louisville, Ky., 
who some few years ago delivered a course of lectures on 
the Brain, before the Medical School of the Boston Univer- 
sity, in his Journal of Man, Yol. 1., p. 440, begins the article 
entitled “The Present State of Medical Science ” as follows: 
“Of all known sciences none have been more unstable, con- 
fused and contradictory in doctrines than practical medi- 
cine. Not only is it changing from age to age, and even 
from year to year, but on the very same day, if we pass from 
nation to nation, from city to city, or from one medical 
school to another located in a neighboring street, we find 
the most contradictory doctrines taught with dogmatic con- 
fidence at the same hour, and the votaries of each express- 
ing no little contempt for the others.” 
Dr. John Mason Good, author of “The Book of Nature,” 
and an eminent English physician in the earljr part of the 
present century, wrote: “ The science of medicine is a bar- 
barous jargon, and the effects of our medicine on the human 
system are in the highest degree uncertain, except, indeed, 
that they have already destroyed more lives than war, pesti- 
lence and famine combined.” IN THE HEALING ART. 
15 
Bichat (the great French Pathologist), in his “ General 
Anatomy,” Yol. 1., p. 17, remarks: “Medicine is an incohe- 
rent assemblage of incoherent ideas, and is perhaps of all 
the physiological sciences that which best shows the caprice 
of the human mind. What did I say ? It is not a science 
for a methodical mind. It is a shapeless assemblage of in- 
accurate ideas, of observations often puerile, and of formu- 
lae as fantastically conceived as they are tediously arranged.” 
The late Sir Henry Holland, one of the most eminent 
physicians in Europe, in his “ Recollections of Past Life,” 
p. 88, says: “Actual experience, with a sense of responsibil- 
ity attached to it, is the sole school in which to make a good 
physician. One of the most learned men I ever knew in the 
literature of medicine, as well as in physical science, was 
one of the worst practitioners, borrowing his diagnosis from 
books, and not from that happier faculty, almost an instinct, 
a spiritual gift, which enables some men to interpret and act 
upon signs which no book can describe.” The latter class of 
men that Sir Henry mentions are what are sometimes des- 
ignated as born or natural-physicians. 
There are gentlemen in Boston who remember that 
Charles Sumner and Professor Agassiz were advised and at- 
tended each in his last sickness by Prof. Brown S6quard and 
other eminent regular practitioners. Th a postmortem ex- 
aminations of their bodies did not reveal the existence of 
diseases sufficiently dangerous of themselves to cause their 
deaths. All organs were normal. I verily believe that if 
they had been attended and treated exclusively by good 
magnetic healers their lives would have been prolonged, and 
both perhaps might now be alive in our midst. 
That wise and remarkable man, Andrew Jackson Davis, 
beloved by all who know him, whose book entitled “ The 
Physician ” has assisted in liberating thousands and tens of 
thousands of men and women from allegiance to the learned 
doctors, in IY. Great Harmonia, p. 383, says: “It is my 
conviction, the result of considerable investigation, that 
should intelligence he transmitted and proclaimed by some 
undisputed authority that on the last day of December next 
the entire medical profession, except the departments of 
dentistry, surgery and obstetrics, would ‘positively make 
its last appearance ’ in the world, mankind, even with their 
present limited knowledge of the laws of life, even with all 
their diseases and infirmities upon them, would straight- 
way be immeasurably benefited.” And that his opinion 
continued the same for nearly twenty years afterwards 
may fairly be inferred from a communication of his in the 
Banner of Light of January 11th, 1873, wherein he remarks: 
“ The medical profession is based upon a huge mass of 
learned ignorance and assumption,” 
“ The present system of medicine is a burning shame to its 
professors, if, indeed, a series of vague and uncertain incon- 
gruities deserve to be called by that name. How rarely do 
our medicines do good ? How often do they make a patient 
really worse?”—JDr. Bamage, F. B. C. S., London. 
Thomas Inman, M. D., London, author of “Ancient 
Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names,” etc., etc.; consulting 
physician to the Royal Infirmary, Liverpool: Lecturer sue- 16 
CIVIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY 
oessively on Botany, Medical Jurisprudence, Therapeutics, 
Materia Medica, and the Principles and Practice of Medi- 
cine, etc., in the Liverpool School of Medicine, etc., gives the 
following statement of his medical experience and observa- 
tion as a Regular practitioner of the straightest sect of doc- 
tors : 
“ Some thirty years ago, after a period of laborious study (says the 
learned doctor), I became the House Surgeon of a large Infirmary. 
In that institution I was enabled to see the practice of seven differ- 
ent doctors, and to compare the results which followed from their 
various plans of treatment. I soon found that the number of cases 
was nearly equal amongst fhem all, and became certain that recov- 
ery was little influenced by the medicine given. The conclusion 
drawn was, that the physician could do harm, but that his power for 
good was limited. This induced me to investigate the laws of health 
and of disease with an especial desire to discover some sure ground 
on which the healing art might safely stand. The inquiry was a long 
one, and to myself satisfactory. The conclusions to which I came 
were extremely simple, amounting almost to truisms; and I was sur- 
prised that it had required long and sustained labor to find out such 
very homely truths as those which I seemed to have unearthed. Yet 
with this discovery came the assurance that, if I could induce my 
medical brethren to adopt my views, they would deprive themselves 
of the means of living. 
“ Men, like horses or tigers, monkeys and codfish, can do without 
doctors. Here and there, it is true, the art and skill of the physician 
or surgeon can relieve pain, aveit danger from accidents, and ward 
off death for a time; but, in the generality of cases, doctors are pow- 
erless. It is the business of such men, however, to magnify their 
office to the utmost. They get their money ostensibly by curing the 
sick; but it is clear that the shorter the illness, the fewer will be the 
fees, and the more protracted the attendance the larger must be the 
‘ honorarism.’ ” 
Other testimonies of old and experienced physicians of the 
Regular School—not young ones just graduated, possessing 
sheepskin diplomas as the only evidence of their ability to 
cure diseases—might he cited to an indefinite extent. Let 
one more suffice. .It shall be the testimony of Dr. Eliphalet 
Kimball, of New Hampshire. He was a diplomated doctor 
of the Regular School. In his “ Thoughts on Natural Prin- 
ciples,” published in 1867, on page 7 he remarks : 
“ There is a doctorcraft as well as priestcraft. . . . Physicians 
have slain more than war. As instruments of death, in their hands 
calomel, bleeding, and other medicines, have done more than powder 
and ball. The public would be infinitely better off without professed 
physicians. In weak constitutions nature can be assisted. Good 
nursing is necessary, and sometimes roots and herbs do good. In 
strong constitutions medicine is.seldom needed in sickness. To a 
man with a good constitution, and guided by reason in his course of 
living, sickness would be impossible. He could defer death until the 
natural time. By the use of reason in food I passed unharmed 
through the great cholera in New York in 1832. I was nearly two 
months in a cholera hospital, engaged with the sick, day and night. 
The medical practice provided and paid for by the city was nonsense 
and an injury to the sick.” 
On page 8 of the same work Dr. Kimball continues as 
follows: 
“ Immense numbers of children in canker-rash have been killed by 
the ‘ regulars,’ or scientific doctors, of whom I am one. The prac- 
tice of many of them has been to give a powerful cathartic and calo- 
mel at first. The consequence is the rash cannot come out, the child 
sinks away and dies. In many of the country towns as many as sixty IN THE HEALING ART. 
17 
children have died of canker-rash in one winter, and nearly all of 
them, undoubtedly, from medicine given them hy physicians. It is 
shocking to think how many soldiers in the late war were killed, or 
their constitutions ruined by army doctors. The Irrational use of 
medicine by physicians sweeps off the people as fast as war could. 
It has a serious effect upon the census. . . . Confidence in nature 
is the all-important principle, not only in disease, hut in social wel- 
fare as affected hy government. Artificial law causes the diseases 
of society, and has made the world a bad one.” 
The third statement in the preamble of the petition of the 
Social Science Association is, “that by the laws of this State, 
death caused by culpable and reckless ignorance of duty is 
not considered manslaughter by the courts in regard to phy- 
sicians, although it is held to be manslaughter in the case of 
those following other callings, so that ignorant and self- 
styled physicians are not restrained by fear of the law from 
recklessly trifling with the Mves of the citizens of this State.” 
To this statement I would answer that if the law of the 
Stafe be as specified in that statement, let the law he amend- 
ed, so that all physicians—the Regular as well as the irregu- 
lar ones, if they perpetrate manslaughter on their patients, 
shall be held responsible and amenable to law. This course 
has been adopted in Rhode Island, and the Feburary num- 
ber, 1880, of the New England Medical Gazette, the monthly 
organ of the Homeopaths, quickly gives warning to doctors 
and to all its readers, by itemizing the case, on pp. Gl-C2, as 
follows : 
“ Ayoung man whose fingers had been cutoff hy a circular saw 
was taken to a Rhode Island Charity Hospital, where the excessive 
hemorrhage was controlled by the use of a tourniquet, which, how- 
ever, having been kept on seventeen hours, necessitated amputation 
of the arm at the shoulder. The Court at first decided that a charity 
institute should not beheld liable for unskillful treatment, hut the 
Supreme Court decided that Hospital Corporations should he re- 
sponsible for lack of care in selecting skillful men.” 
If we need additional legislation in Massachusetts to re- 
strain manslaughter or malpractice by physicians, let us 
have it. But the plan proposed by the Social Science Asso- 
ciation, while tending to exclude from practice many meri- 
torious and efficient healers of disease, whom the school 
physicians stigmatize as quacks and charlatans, does, as ap- 
pears by its own statement, make no provision for holding to 
a proper responsibility such regular certificated physicians as 
may by accident, mischance, or culpable and reckless igno- 
rance of duty, commit manslaughter on their patients. Let 
us have equal rights. Make both the regular and the irreg- 
ular practitioner responsible each for his doings, and equally 
amenable to the law. 
Tue conclusion and prayer of the Social Science Associa- 
tion petitioners is “ that the General Court will by suitable 
legislation and registration prevent all persons from practic- 
ing any branch of medicine in this State, except such per- 
sons ns have furnished to the authorities of the State suf- 
ficient evidence of good moral character, and of the posses- 
sion of a thorough knowledge of their duty and calling.” 
This plan thus suggested appears to mo impracticable. The 
Bill proposes that the Governor shall appoint from the mem- 
bers of existing incorporated medical societies the persons 
who shall constitute the Board of Medical Registration. But 18 
CIYIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY 
as I have previously stated, there are many citizens who do 
not Avant as their medical attendants the practitioners of 
any incorporated medical school. Moreover is the Governor 
(excellent man as he is) any better qualified, or are his ap- 
pointees more likely, to select suitable and acceptable phy- 
sicians for you and me and our families and the citizens of 
the State, than are you and I, and the rest of the people of 
lawful age and of sound and disposing mind and memory? 
Why should not such persons be permitted to select their 
OAvn medical attendant and comforter ? Let us have free 
physicians and patients’ rights. 
Furthermore, the proposed Act, in its policy, appeals to 
the selfishness of the members of the Board of Medical 
Registration, to restrict to the smallest possible quota the 
number of practitioners whom they may permit to practice 
in the State. The smaller the number of practitioners, the 
larger the field of practice for themselves and their asso- 
ciates in the medical societies, and the more abundant the 
harvest of their fees. Such legislation as this is retrograde, 
mediaeval, not even up to that of the age which abolished 
licensed printing. 
The petitioners ask that the practitioners should he of 
“good moral character.” So do I; and not only that all 
practitioners, hut that every man, woman and child in the 
State may be of “good moral character.” But I do not be- 
lieve that such legislation will secure either the one or the 
other of these desirable ends. With no intention of wound- 
ing the feelings of any one, I would ask you to call to mind 
a tragedy which occurred some years ago within the Avails of 
yonder Harvard Medical School, in Grove street, Boston. 
There, in a regular medical school, one regular Doctor, being 
himself a Professor in that school, murdered* another regular 
Doctor, who had been a bountiful benefactor of that school. 
Would any certificate or other evidence of good moral char- 
acter granted by a Board of Medical Registration have pre- 
vented that catastrophe ? Ido not believe that it is or will he 
in the power of any Board of Medical Registration to distin- 
guish and to separate the Avheat from the tares among medi- 
cal practitioners. I surmise that Avhile gathering in the 
tares they will root up also the wheat with them. 
The plan of restricting medical practice to so-called edu- 
cated physicians, somewhat as now proposed in this Bill, has 
been tried in Europe and England. Let us briefly notice how 
it worked. 
In the fourteenth century, the Roman Catholic church re- 
stricted the practice of medicine solely to educated practi- 
tioners. It proclaimed “ that any woman who dared to heal 
others without having duly studied, was a witch, and should 
therefore die.”—(Michelet’s Witches of the Middle Ages, p. 15.) 
But Paracelsus had no respect for the learning of the edu- 
cated physicians. At Basle he threw the works of Calen 
and Avicenna into the fire, and in disgust at the pretensions 
and false knowledge of the medical faculty, said there Avas 
more knowledge in his shoe-strings than in the writings of 
•In 1849, Dr. George Parkman was there murdered by Prof. J. W. Web- 
ster. IN' THE HEALING ART. 
19 
all the physicians; he averred that he knew nothing but 
what he had learned from witches.—(J. Michelet’s La Sor- 
ciere, p. 5.) 
During the reign of Henry YITI. Parliament undertook by 
statute to limit the practice of the healing art in England to 
“those persons that be profound, sad and discreet, groundly 
learned and deeply studied in physic,” and practitioners 
were “to be licensed by the Bishop of London or the Dean 
of St. Paul’s.” But in 1543 the previous act was modified so 
as to permit “divers honest persons, as well men as women, 
whom God hath endowed with the knowledge of the nature, 
kind and operation of certain herbs, roots and waters,” to 
prescribe'for and treat certain dangerous afflictions there 
mentioned.—{Knight's History of England, Vol. 11., p. 498.) 
Yet notwithstanding these experiences of the past, many 
medical practitioners, many diplomated and certificated 
graduates of the schools, are now ready and eager to pro- 
claim the superiority of their own practice to that of other 
physicians, and to exalt and to fight for the morality and 
science of their favorite schools. 
The quarrels, jealousies, personal enmities and feuds of 
different schools of medicine are notorious. What land or 
State of the Union has not been filled with the tumult of 
their brawls. The fight between the Allopathists.and Home- 
opathists in Massachusetts—between heroic doses and in- 
finitesimal pellets—was bitter. As is well known, three 
years or more ago, Allopathists. after a protracted struggle, 
succeeded in expelling certain Homeopathists from the Mas- 
sachusetts Medical Society. Then the Homeopathists held 
a great Fair in Boston, raised money, started their own medi- 
cal society, obtained a charter from the State, and now 
Allopathists, Homeopathists and Eclectics for the time being 
ignore their ancient feuds, and join hand to hand to crush 
out all healing mediums, spirit mediums, clairvoyants, and 
all other competitors. Occasionally has it happened in other 
times and places (for history repeats itself,) that rival pow- 
ers have for the moment become complaisant to each other, 
if by so doing they could rid themselves of other obnoxious 
parties. In Luke xxiii: 12, one may read that on a certain 
day, when a much-maligned but faultless man was before 
the magistrates, fiercely accused of much evil doing, on 
the same day Herod and Pilate were made friends together, 
for before they were at enmity between themselves. 
In this present application to the Legislature for special 
legislation in behalf of diplomated doctors, of incorporated 
medical schools, efforts are made to vilify and scandalize 
their opponents. The petition of the Social Science Asso- 
ciation would excite your fears of “ ignorant, self-styled phy- 
sicians.” I surmise there are more of such physicians among 
the young graduates of the Regular schools, especially in 
therapeutics, than in any other class of the community. 
The New England Medical Gazette, the monthly organ of the 
Homeopathic school, in its February number, 1880, p. 36, 
says that “the proposed Medical Bill will be opposed only by 
unprincipled charlatans or their agents or dupes.” It is an 
old adage : Give a dog an ill name and he ’ll soon be hanged. 
Give a man an ill name and his work is done. Such argu- 20 
CIYIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY 
ments we hope will not weigh with the legislators of Massa- 
chusetts. Regular medical practitioners are apt to stigma- 
tize other physicians as quacks, charlatans and humbugs, 
yet they will appropriate (though sometimes not till after 
the common people are thoroughly acquainted with them) 
the remedies and discoveries of the men they affect to de- 
spise. 
Says Dr. Adam Smith : “ After denouncing Paracelsus as 
a quack the Regular medical profession stole his ‘quack- 
silver ’ (mercury); after calling Jenner an impostor it adopt- 
ed his discovery of vaccination; after dubbing Harvey a 
humbug it was forced to swallow his theory of the circula- 
tion of the blood.” 
“Remember,” said Dr. Rush, addressing medical stu- 
dents, “how many of our most useful remedies have been 
discovered by quacks. Do not be afraid, therefore, of con- 
versing with them and of profiting by their ignorance and 
temerity. Medicine has its Pharisees as well as religion, 
but the spirit of this sect is as unfriendly to the advance- 
ment of medicine as it is to Christian charity. In the pur- 
suit of medical knowledge let me advise you to converse 
with nurses and old women. They will often suggest facts 
in the history and cure of diseases which have escaped the 
most sagacious observers of nature. By so doing you may 
discover laws of the animal economy which have no place 
in our system of nosology, or in our theories of physic.”— 
Dr. Daniel IT. Tube’s “ Influence of Mind on the Body,” p. 9. 
In the history of science it has often been the fortune of 
the ignorant and the lowly to hit by chance on some great 
fact for which the wisdom of the ages has sought in vain. 
Especially has this been the case in Therapeutics. Truly 
says Dr. Stillo, {Therapeutics, Vol. 1., p. 31), “Nearly every 
medicine has become a popular remedy before being adopt- 
ed or even tried by physicians, ‘ that by far the greater 
number of medicines were first employed in countries which 
were and are now in a state of scientific ignorance,’ and Pe- 
reira declares that nux vomica is one of the few remedies the 
discovery of which is not the effect of chance.”—Beard and 
Rockwell on Medical and Surgical Electricity, p. 110. 
“It is idle to hope for a time when a medical prescription 
should be a simple resultant of human qualities”; “the 
number of those in the profession is rather increasing than 
diminishing with the advance of science, yet therapeutics is 
mainly a matter of empiricism.”—p. 125. 
Dr. D. R. Tuke in bis “ Influence of the Mind upon the Body” 
p. 343, quotes Burton’s pitby observation that an empiric ora 
silly chirurgeon doth more strange cures than a rational 
physician. Nymannas gives the reason because the patient 
puts his confidence in him, which Avicenna prefers before 
art, precepts, and all remedies whatever. ’T is opinion 
alone, says Cardan, that makes or mars physicians, and he 
doth the best cures, according to Hippocrates, in whom 
most Rust. “Perhaps the great fault of physicians in this 
most literal and material age is to undervalue the errone- 
ous curative influence of the mind over special forms of dis- 
ease.”—Ur. Edward T. Blake in Dublin University Magazine 
for October, 1877, on the Medical Basis of Charms. IN THE HEALING ART. 
21 
“With the exception of a very few, and those compara- 
tively insignificant diseases, the medical art does not pos- 
sess the power of curing disease in a direct and positive 
manner. In the very few diseases in which it may bo said 
to do so, speaking generally, it not seldom fails to do so in 
individual instances, so that such cases require to be trans- 
ferred to other categories of therapeutic action.”—Of Nature 
and Art in the Cure of Disease, by Sir John Forbes, p. 256. 
In 1842, at a discussion at the Medical and Chirnrgical 
Society, on an operation performed without pain under the 
influence of Mesmerism, a distinguished member of the pro- 
fession, the late Dr. Copland, asserted that the fact was un- 
worthy of the Society’s consideration, because pain is a wise 
provision of nature, and patients are all the better for it, and 
recover more quickly.—Dr. D. H. Take’s Influence of the Mind 
Upon the Body, p. 49. 
“The editor of Chelius wrote against ether, ‘I have a con- 
siderable doubt of the propriety of putting the patient into 
so unnatural a condition as results from inhaling ether*, 
which seems scarcely different from severe intoxication, a 
state in which no surgeon would he desirous of having a 
patient who was about to he submitted to a serious opera- 
tion.’ ”—p. 49. 
For more than thirty years last past, healing mediums and 
magnetic healers have exercised their vocation in laying 
their hands upon their patients, and by this simple process 
have been wonderfully successful in relieving them of their 
ills and maladies and restoring them to health. It came into 
vogue in this country about the time that Mesmerism at- 
tracted the attention of many thoughtful and progressive 
minds. In 1847, James Victor Wilson, a special friend, and 
attendant at the lectures of Andrew Jackson Davis, wrote 
and published a small practical treatise on “Magnetism and 
Clairvoyance,” with instructions on the method of procedure. 
The Regular Medical School, with few exceptions, either 
ignored the subject or, as we have seen Dr. Copland did, op- 
posed it. But irregular physicians and practitioners, and 
especially Spiritualists, examined the matter, and experi- 
mented in it. Their patients liked it. It gradually grew in 
favor. Good results—wonderful, marvelous, instantaneous 
cures—often followed its application. Who has not heard of 
John R. Newton, the celebrated healer ? I have seen crowds 
of the lame, the halt, the deaf, the blind, come to him to be 
cured of their infirmities. He ti’eated them one by one—a 
few passes over them, or the pressure of his hands upon 
them, a few kind words, a blessing or a prayer—and again 
and again I have seen his patients walk away cured or much 
relieved of their lameness or other weaknesses, leaving their 
crutches, their canes, their spectacles and ear-trumpets be- 
hind them. Often did such treatment do good ; seldom 
or never did it harm any person. Spiritualists liked it; other 
people liked it. It has become popular. Now the old-school 
physicians, the Regulars, are looking into it. Of the various 
applications which magnetic healers and healing mediums 
make with their hands in rubbing, kneading, stroking, tap- 
ping and slapping the bodies of their patients, and which 
they include under the name of magnetic or mesmeric treat- 22 
CIVIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY 
ment, the Regulars have learned something, and now desig- 
xxate such treatment as massage. Dr. Adams, President of 
the Board of Health, or of the Boax’d of Medical Examina- 
tion, in New Hampshixe, ixx his testixxxoxxy before you said: 
“Every physician knows massage ; rubbing is all there is in 
it.” I hope you and he will pardon me, if Ido not agree with 
him in either of his statements, and permit me to comment 
on them. 
A valuable article entitled “The History of Massage.” by 
Dr. Douglass Graham, of Bostoxx, was published in the Medi- 
cal Record last August. The writer states “that ixx 1876 
there were xxxaxxy physicians in Germany” (which with Aus- 
tria is probably the headquartei’s of regular medical skill) 
“who had never heard of massage, and that it was then an 
every-day question as to what it meant.” Dr. S. Weir Mitch- 
ell, ixx his treatise on “ Fat and Blood, and How to Make 
Theixx,” published ixx 1879, devotes Chapter V. to Massage, 
and says it “is little understood in America,” that he “ fix’st 
saw it used by a charlatan,” and that “the x-esults obtained 
wex-e so x-emarkable that he began soon after to learn what 
he could cf its employment,” and that he “soon found he 
had an agent little understood and of singular utility.” 
Prof. Von Morengeil of Bonn, speaking of massage, says, 
(as quoted by Dr. Graham in his tract, “ Massage,” p. 27,) 
“Its value must be recognized, but it is not adapted for 
every-day use by every physician ; nor will it be much used 
in hospitals for lack of time. . . . Specialists, thei’efoi’e, 
will probably get the most satisfactory results from it.” 
But Dr. Adams further says that “Rubbing is all there is in 
it.” I believe that something more than mere rubbing is in it. 
Dr. Graham, p. 29, says, “Some people have a natural t act with 
a peculiar quality of strength and structure of hands which 
render them vastly superior as manipulators.” Hippocrates 
says (as quoted in James Victor Wilson’s treatise, p. 11,) 
that the. heat which oozes out of Ihe hand on being applied 
to the sick is highly salutary, and that it has often appeared 
to him while he has thus been soothing his patients as if 
there were a singular property in his hands to pull out and 
drain away from the affected parts aches and divers impuri- 
ties by laying his hand upon the place and extending his 
fingers toward it. “It is known,” he says, “ that health may 
be implanted in the sick by certain gestures and by contact.” 
Real benefit was often derived from the use of Perkins’s me- 
tallic tractors by persons upon whose bodies they were ap- 
plied at the beginning of the present century. It was sup- 
posed that galvanism, excited by or imparted from the me- 
tallic tractors, produced the benefit; but when salutary re- 
sults followed the manipulation of two pieces of wood paint- 
ed to resemble the metal tractors, then the Regulars sup- 
posed that the patient’s faith wrought his cure. For myself, 
I think that it has been and often is something more than 
mere rubbing, or the patient’s faith, or expectant attention, 
that substitutes health for sickness, and strength for debili- 
ty, both in cases of patients operated on by healing medi- 
ums, or by metallic or wooden tractors. Otherwise, why 
have the tractors lost their efficacy, and why are the rub- 
bings of certain hireling hospital manipulators of but little IX THE HEALIXG ART. 
23 
effect ? These and other considerations not appropriate now 
to be dwelt upon, have constrained me to believe that spirit- 
ual agencies and angel operators at some times more than at 
other times, with some patients more than with others, co- 
operate with certain mediums and healers more than with 
other operators, in relieving patients of their sicknesses and 
maladies. At some times, healer and patient have, as I be- 
lieve, entertained angels unawares. 
Another point in connection with Dr. Adams’s testimony- 
before the Committee now occurs to me. You doubtless re- 
member the means that he said he employed to prevent 
irregular physicians or what he called quacks from practic- 
ing in Manchester, X. H., where he resides and practices. 
When an itinerant healer there arrived and put out his sign 
or circular, Dr. Adams said that he informed the city mar- 
shal thereof, who in his turn sent an official notice to the 
new-come doctor warning him of the law, and hinting at 
prospective prosecution, etc. Such a notice is sufficient, said 
Dr. Adams, his'face mantling with smiles at his shrewdness 
and success ; the quack soon folds his tent and silently steals 
away and probably returns to Boston. lam free to say that 
I did not appreciate Dr. Adams’s services in thus excluding 
healers and itinerant physicians from Manchester as highly 
as the doctor seemed to value them. I thought of the 
chronic sick people there living, who but for theXew Hamp- 
shire restrictive law would probably have been healed or 
greatly benefited, but their health continued broken and mis- 
erable. Why? Because they knew not and were not per- 
mitted to know of the time of their visitation by messengers 
of health, some of Avhora doubtless wander about destitute 
and afflicted, like the healers mentioned in the Bible, of 
whom the world was not worthy. 
Section 3 of the proposed bill provides that applicants for 
a license to practice medicine, shall be examined on such 
subjects as the board of medical registration shall require, 
“not including therapeutics.” But therapeutics is the only 
department of medicine in which magnetizers, healing and 
medical mediums practice. It is the only department where- 
in the Bill requires no examination of its It is 
the only department wherein Allopaths, Homeopaths and 
Eclectics do not agree, and about which they quarrel with 
one another and with everybody else. It is in therapeutics 
that many Spiritualists, reformers and other people, will 
trust healers, but will not trust regulars. Xow please remem- 
ber that according to the philosophy of Andrew Jackson 
Davis disease is discord; it is a disturbance, or an inhar- 
monious circulation of the spiritual principle through the 
organism. Magnetizers, healing and medical mediums in 
their treatment of, and prescriptions to patients, seek to lull 
the discord—to harmonize the circulation of the spiritual 
g-inciple, to bring peace to the troubled body and soul, 
ence their healing practices may properly be called Spir- 
itual or Harmonizing therapeutics and their system may be 
termed the Harmonial system. The proposed Bill leaves to, 
and permits Allopaths to practice Allopathic therapeutics. 
Homeopaths to practice Homeopathic therapeutics. Eclec- 
tics to practice Eclectic therapeutics. Why, then, in a Com- 24 
CIVIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY 
monwealth which undertakes to secure equal rights and lib- 
erties to its citizens, should not magnetizers, healing and 
medical mediums he permitted to practice their Spiritual 
and Harmonial therapeutics? especially upon patients 
who believe in and prefer that practice and go to them for 
it ? But two or three points were urged in behalf of the pe- 
titioners which it may he well here briefly to notice. 
1. Dr. Cornell said in effect, “lot healers, clairvoyants 
and others, who object to the Bill, form a society of their 
own, and become incorporated as we Eclectics did.” To 
this I answer that the Constitution of the State declares 
that the end of government is to furnish to the individuals 
of the body politic “the power of enjoying in safety and 
tranquility their natural rights.” It treats its citizens as 
individuals. It does not require that they should first be- 
come corporations, or members of an incorporated society, 
before they may enjoy in safety and tranquility their nat- 
ural rights.—{Preamble of the Constitution.) 
2, A physician, in the truest, broadest sense of that term, 
belongs to, and practices in no exclusive school of medicine. 
He may have been trained as an Allopath, or as an Homeo- 
path, or as a Botanic practitioner ; but as he grows in wis- 
dom and knowledge, he perceives evils and deficiencies in 
each system, and excellencies inside and outside of other 
systems. Hence a progressive physician necessarily out- 
grows the limitations of sectarian medical societies and 
systems, and learns to recognize and apply in practice other 
curative agencies. Afiopaths may call themselv s regular, 
but so long as they adhere exclusively to Allopathic reme- 
dies and modes of treatment (call themselves by what name 
they may) they are simply sectarists in medicine—or incomr 
plete phvsicians. Were a member of the Massachusetts 
Medical Society to say, as its President recently did in your 
hearing, that he would not consult with a Homeopathic phy- 
sician, even if the patient was dying, I should infer that 
such an one was a sectarist in the healing art, a fractional 
physician, and not a physician in its truest and broadest 
sense. I should infer that he had hardened his better 
nature, and dwarfed his manhood to the rules of his 
society, and that the Massachusetts Medical Society had 
outlived its usefulness. The Pharisees had no dealings with 
the Samaritans, but Jesus, the noblest of all the Hebrews, 
was not bound by their limitations; he ate and drank with 
publicans and sinners. “l am a man,” said Terrence, “and 
nothing that pertains to man is alien to me.” Which were 
the truest men, which the great physicians, which more 
likely to he public benefactors—ancient democrats who set 
at naught, or modern doctors, stunted by the restrictions of 
sectarian medical schools, and plotting for protective legisla- 
tion for themselves ? 
3. The counsel for the Society of Specialists mentioned it 
as an existing evil that strangers needing a physician cannot 
learn irora their signs and titles whether they are regular 
doctors or quacks. This difficulty arises from the medical 
faculty attempting to include iii their professional titles 
more than they are honestly entitled to. M. D. is an abbre- 
viation of Doctor of Medicine. Many systems or schools of IN THE HEALING ART. 
medicine exist. There are doctors or persons learned in 
the Allopathic system of medicine but not learned in the 
Homeopathic system. There ai’e doctors or persons learned 
in the Homeopathic but not learned in the Allopathic system 
of medicine, and there are doctors or persons learned in the 
Eclectic or Botanic system but not learned in the Allopathic 
or Homeopathic system. Now let these diverse practition- 
ers specialize, and by their titles indicate their special sys- 
tems of practice. Let the Allopath name or indicate his 
vocation, not as Doctor of Medicine in its widest significa- 
tion, which he is not, for he is not learned in all systems of 
medicine, certainly not in the Harmonial system—but is 
learned in one department of it, viz.. Allopathy; let him 
therefore style himself and be called Allopath, and put, if 
he wish it, A. M. D. after his name. So let the Homeo- 
pathic practitioner call himself and be called Homeopath, 
and append, if he desire it, H. M. D. to his name; and let 
the Eclectic designate his calling as Eclectic Doctor of Medi- 
cine, and ornament his name with E. M. D. This plan is 
one of specialization (and the scientific practice of the age 
more and more tends to specialties), and is one which if the 
Society of Specialists adopted, would tend to diminish the 
evil complained of by their counsel, and obviate the need of 
any additional legislation in the matter. 
4. One of the learned counsel in advocating the Bill 
stated that its enactment would not exclude magnetizers 
from practicing their vocation. Now if magnetizers did no 
more than manipulate their patients the statement would 
be true. But there are magnetizers and clairvoyants, and 
healing, and medical, and spirit mediums who prescribe and 
sometimes prepare medicines, usually very simple ones, for 
their patients. Such prescribing of medicine is within the 
purview of the Act, and Section 11 provides that any person 
who shall practice medicine within the Commonwealth 
without being duly licensed or authorized thereto, shall be 
punished by a fine. Consequently the proposed Bill pro-* 
mbits from practice in the State all unlicensed prescribing 
magnetizers, clairvoyant healing mediums, and spirit me- 
diums. 
I would here present some arguments (cogent ones they 
are,) of eminent physicians in favor of Universal Medical 
Freedom for all practitioners—diplomated or undiplomated 
—of this school or that school, or of no school of medicine. 
Dr. James John Garth Wilkinson, of London, in his pam- 
phlets entitled “A Free State and Free Medicine,” and 
“Medical Freedom,” published in 1870, and Dr. Joseph R. 
Buchanan, now Professor of Physiology, Anthropology and 
Physiological Institutes of Medicine in the Eclectic Medical 
College of the City of New York, in his “ Earnest Appeal for 
Medical Freedom,” published in Boston in 1877, advocate 
that beneficent and liberal plan of medical practice. Even 
the New England Medical Gazette, which now favors the 
present proposed Medical Bill, and says “it will be opposed 
only by unprincipled charlatans, or their agents or dupes,” 
in its April issue, 1877, p. 178, declared then that such a law 
could bring nothing but pollution to medicine. But let me 
quote its exact words : “A bill is pending in Tennesse&'to 26 
CIVIL AXD MEDICAL LIBERTY 
protect citizens from empiricism.’ But there, as in Michi- 
gan, where a trial of ‘State Medicine’ has been made, and 
elsewhere, the opinion prevails that the law can bring noth- 
ing but pollution to medicine, and that if the profession can- 
not stand on its own merits, it cannot be propped up by the 
law. This is the principle homeopaths have always acted 
on, and the most sensible men among regulars recognize its 
merits, and understand the folly of attempting the practice 
of exclusion.” But now this same Homeopathic New Eng- 
land Medical Gazette advocates a restrictive medical law, 
and in its last May number says Massachusetts, and every 
State in the Union, needs it. It gives reasons. Its last is 
probably its strongest argument, viz., that such alawisan im- 
perative necessity “for the protection of the medical profes- 
sion.” When the editor was an outsider, and felt the cut of 
the Allopathic lash, he denounced Ihewhip; now he would 
like to hold that same whip, and lash all other physicians 
outside the incorporated schools. Whether he be at the butt 
end or the tail end of a whip, strangely alters the critic’s 
opinion of its efficacy. 
As Dr. Wilkinson’s pamphlets in favor of “ A Free State 
and Free Medicine ” are scarce and but little known in this 
country, and his arguments are good, I shall quote quite 
freely from them. Dr. Buchanan’s pamphlet was published 
and can easily be obtained in Boston, therefore from it I 
shall give no extracts. Dr. Wilkinson has been and is wide- 
ly and favorably known in Great Britain and the United 
States, especially by Homeopathists and Swedenborgians, 
for his many valuable publications and because of his high 
character as a physician and a philanthropist. He writes, 
“I plead in the name and interest of the community alone.” 
“ The medical profession has crept into the Government 
and is inciting it to breaches of the most sacred freedom,” 
pp. 2, 3. “It undertakes to immure the people of these 
Islands” (i. e., England and Ireland) “in its own narrow 
materialism,” p. 21. Says Dr. Wilkinson, “the arrogance of 
chartered medicine has been displayed on various subjects 
ever since I entered the profession. When Mesmerism 
came up, and nobody knew anything about it, and a few 
wished to learn by experiment, chartered medicine appear- 
ed upon every mesmeric scene and attempted by violence to 
foreclose the experiment. It swooped down upon the peo- 
ple who were investigating; it knew that the whole exhibi- 
tion was humbug and imposture, and it comforted itself 
with an enormity of conceited ignorance such as no one can 
command or contain unless he has a permanent conceit 
pipe running into him directly from a chartered college. 
And yet, reader, the subject was new; these little men 
knew nothing about it, but they hated it: and they hated it 
.because it enlarged the domain of physiology and psycholo- 
gy beyond their possession; and their possession was nar- 
row, their heart was narrow and their mind was narrow, 
and their spirit was, not because their calling was no cre- 
ation of God, but a manufacture of their State colleges,” 
p. 22. “Why do candid physicians every now and then as- 
tonish casual hearers by a hint of the very small progress 
which therapeutics have made since the day of Galen ? Why IX THE HEALING ABT. 
27 
does poor little Medicine, stunted and wizened, cast so wist- 
ful an eye at the strong limbs and bouncing proportions of 
cousin Chemistry ? Simply because the unhappy child has 
been brought up on little but maintenance of truth, while 
her relative, lucky in not being committed to the care of 
colleges, has been brought up on progress of science. Go for 
progress, and let truth maintain herself,” p. 23. 
Dr. Wilkinson says that “for thirty years he has been con- 
vinced of the inestimable benefits to be derived from medi- 
cal freedom ; that the results of all legislation toward free- 
dom have deepened his conviction. Many years ago he 
translated Swedenborg’s “Animal Kingdom,” a work in 
which a free layman demonstrated by light and life that the 
psychology and physiology of the body of man are opened by 
God to free thought where they are closed against profes- 
sional thought,” p. 29. 
“Not a college, sect or diploma will perish when physic is 
free from State patronage and protection: ” that is to say, 
unless public bodies, (i. e., State colleges and chartered med- 
ical societies) “choose to disband themselves. The only 
power they will lose, will be the power of harming other 
bodies or other people not of their way of thinking. They 
will gain the power of emulating the good works and open- 
mindedness of all the useful people whom they have called 
quacks, and impostors, and unqualified practitioners, who 
have been the moving wheels of practice in all ages of the 
world,” p. 33. 
To the question whether he would commit the lives of the 
community to the possible intervention of uneducated men. 
Dr. Wilkinson answers, p. 34, “ The education of the schools 
cannot fit men for curing the diseases of their fellows ! it is 
only one way of launching them toward professional, but 
not necessarily healing life. A man of no Latin, no anato- 
my, no physiology, is every now and then a good physician, 
though he sits on the lowest forms of society. He is edu- 
cated for that use, though he cannot write his own name. 
By freedom bring him into rapport with the light of learning 
if you can, but at all events kill not the divine power which 
is in him of doing good because he is not educated up to your 
bench.” 
“The State, it is true, can exact from every one that he or 
she shall pass through a curriculum of preparatory studies 
and hospital attendance to fit him to enter upon practice. 
But of the studies, mauy may be useless except as accom- 
plishments. From the studies many useful ones may be left 
out owing to the bigotry of the elders. The diploma may he 
sought as the shield of protection to the doctor, rather than as 
the shield of health to the patient. Numerous men naturally 
qualified for medicine, born doctors maybe, are shut out 
from their life-work by the expense which confines the 
practice of physic to the abler, i. e., the wealthier ‘classes.’ 
State licentiates leaning upon their diplomas are apt, from 
the very necessity of their practice, to be mastered by a con- 
ceit in which natural skill must languish. To be built up 
against freedom, to be privileged, is to be built up against 
nature. . . . The root and basis of medicine is the love 
of healing in the universal heart and mind,” pp. 35-36. 28 
CIVIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY 
“An imnressionhas been sedulously cultivated that Anat- 
omy and Physiology. Pathology, and various other branches 
of science are the healing virtues in the world, and that 
they and the written practice of medicine constitute posi- 
tive faculties in man; whereas they are mere books, or at 
best outlying experiences. Not one of them has any direct 
relation, any rule of thumb, to a single case that will 
hereafter occur. In every instance they require to pass 
through a living medical perception to he of any use. That 
perception and all that belongs to it is a spiritual thing, and 
must only he fed, but not substituted or overlaid by knowl- 
edge. It is an appetite for doing good and working cures, 
and experience and knowledge must feed it; and this must 
take place upon true social conditions ; that is to say, all the 
men who belong naturally to the calling must be encouraged 
by the absence of State interference to take their places at 
the Board of Healiny,” p. 37. 
“Emancipate medicine from State trammels, and poor 
men’s medical colleges would arise, and compete not ignobly 
with other colleges. The poor could then be attended by 
educated men of their own sort at small expense, and the 
masses generally would be raised by having their own un- 
scorned natural professions, and a new class of bluff, honest 
common sense, and artisan ways of natural life -would be 
added to these noble arts. The medical instinct and inspira- 
tion of humanity shall stand upon their feet in the masses,” 
p. 42. 
“ The protection of medicine by the State is artificiality 
and injustice. Remove it, and with it you begin to remove 
the baneful belief—nowall but universal—that medical men 
can be created by culture ; that real culture can come from 
without, and that nature and gifts of the men are of 
second rate importance.” p. 43. 
“I owe it,” says Dr. Wilkinson, at the close of his Free 
State and Free Medicine, “to all my medical brothers and sis- 
ters, to say, that though I have spoken hardly of their corpo- 
rations, I desire to speak and think reverently and lovingly 
of themselves ; for I am one of them, on hoard of their own 
boat. lam an old medical practitioner, forty years at the 
work. And especially do I desire to see ns all more free and 
open in our hearts and minds, less fearful and less unbeliev- 
ing ; looking less to the past than to God and the future, and 
praying for his inspiration while we scan all nature and 
art and books for this instruction. And I have learnt that 
the way to advance to all this, is by going out of State swad- 
dling clothes, and under heaven winning for ourselves free- 
dom of medicine in the greater freedom of our country,” p. 30. 
Some eight or ten years passed after the publication of 
Dr. Wilkinson’s pamphlets on Medical Freedom. The Regular 
Allopathic Schools and Faculty continued to hold by legal 
enactments the almost entire monopoly of medical practice 
in Great Britain. Again did Dr. Wilkinson protest against 
its injustice, wrong, and oppression. From his “ Human 
Science and Divine Revelation,” recently published, I 
make the following extracts : 
“ Look at the medical ‘ Eegulars,’ grasping at place and power 
that the dogmas of the most uncertain of arts and sciences may he IN THE HEALING ART. 
29 
secured and attested,not by nature but by Parliament.” . . . “See 
the empire of violent drugs, of quinine and calomel and chemicals, 
still holding much of its own sway. Mark the new extension of the 
opiate delusion, the chloroform and chlorals which are committed as 
a habit, and a destroying habit it is, to the rich. Look at the vast 
hospitals which are medical and surgical thrones, where patients die 
at a rate unknown to private practice. Observe corporate medical 
secrecy and its technical pharmacopoeias which warns the public 
from learning the mystery of its own diseases,” p. 37. 
He exhorts the people “ to shake the aristocracy of medicine, sub- 
mit it to a vigilant popular tribunal, and shift and subordinate the 
medical mind and conscience as a centre in the country,” p. 45. He 
insists that Ibe “lust of drugging is the demon of medicine,” p. 4G, 
and that such a healing art is a bad healer; that it tortures and short- 
ens, and does not bless nor lengthen human life, and leaves out the 
marrow of cure; p. 49. He says that “Hospitals are artificial in- 
festations and pollutions of the peace of the general health,” p. 51. 
“ The centralization and papacy of medicine bus advanced into the 
State, and a virtual infallibility has been claimed for its orthodoxies, 
which are carried forth” in England “with terrible compulsory 
legislation. The evil power that has been cast down from the cleri- 
cal plane lias fallen upon the lower level of the doctors, and the earth 
is troubled with their use of it,” p. 430. 
“ Commit every calling to its own maintenance and responsibility; 
do not privilege it and pay It, in no way direct or indirect, for ortho- 
doxy or belief in articles, and let every man practice without inter- 
ference of law, leaving bis competency to be decided only by bis 
employers, and any barm he does to be answered before the ordinary 
tribunals,” p. 430. 
In the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States 
it appears that the people of the United States ordained and 
established that Constitution (among other objects) to se- 
cure the blessings of liberty to themselves and to their pos- 
terity. Certainly does not that declaration include that 
you, I, and all the people of the United States have liberty to 
employ such physicians as we may respectively wish to em- 
ploy ? 
The Constitution of Massachusetts declares that the end 
and purpose of government is to secure to individuals who 
compose the body politic-" the power of en joying in safety 
and tranquility their natural rights and the blessings of 
life.” Imagine, if you can, a Liberal, a Spiritualist, or any 
other citizen who instinctively shuns the practice of a diplo- 
mated registered doctor of any of the three medical schools, 
as confined at hishome by illness. He sends out for his heal- 
ing magnetizers to relieve him in his sickness. None come. 
They have been debarred from practice by this Act. The 
good wife of the sick man then brings in a young Regular 
doctor to conjecture on her husband’s malady. The sick 
man instinctively shrivels up in horror as he sees the young 
Regular son of Esculapius enter his apartment. The in- 
valid (perhaps he was at one time a member of the Legisla- 
ture) has heard of Regulars. In the discussions there, or 
elsewhere, he has heard or read that Regulars are the men 
who mix drugs of which they know little, to pour into a 
body of which they know less, to cure a disease of which 
they know nothing, that under pretence of helping the pub- 
lic health and good morals they plotted to monopolize the 
medical practice of the State to themselves and their asso- 
ciates. As the young doctor approaches his bedside the sick 
patient, nervous and indignant at a Government doctor be- 30 
CIVIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY, 
ing, as it were, forced upon him, sees expectant fees in that 
doctor’s eyes, purgation in ins pills, venesection in his lan- 
cet, vivisection in his scalpel, variola in his quill points, in- 
flammation in his plasters, poisons in his medicines, confu- 
sion in his prescription, death in his treatment, an expen- 
sive undertaker, and a funeral at his own door. “Throw 
physic to the dogs,” says he, “ I ’ll none of it.” How, under 
such circumstances, can the sick man enjoy, in the safety 
and tranquility assured by the Constitution of his State, his 
natural right of selecting his own friend anddoctor; to com- 
fort, support, strengthen, and, if possible, relieve him of his 
illness? 
Let me delay a moment to explain one ground of the aver- 
sion of this supposed invalid to the Regulars. He has heard, 
as I’ve said, that they are the men “who mix drugs of 
which they know nothing” ; (have not my citations of the 
testimonies of many eminent physicians tended to prove 
that part of the statement ?) “to pour into a body of which 
they know less,”—they know less because they know not of. 
and do not minister with their medicines to, the spiritual 
principle in man. It is the spirit that pervades the body, it 
is the spirit that quickeneth. (John vi: 03.) When the spirit 
is well, the body is well; when the spirit is sick, the body is 
sick. The flesh profiteth nothing. Regulars minister to the 
body, magnetizers and spirit mediums to the spirit. 
The best government, as I fully believe, is where there is the 
least possible government consistent with the safety of the 
body politic, and the protection of human natural rights. It 
is the special duty and function of good government to pro- 
tect those rights from invasion either by individuals or by 
corporations. Liberty—freedom from interference or op- 
pression by State, church or society—is a great blessing, Jef- 
ferson said, “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” The 
beloved and martyred Abraham Lincoln advocated a gov- 
ernment of the people, by the people, for the people, 
that liberty perish not from the earth; but this pro- 
posed doctors’ bill provides “ a government of the people, 
byf the doctors, for the doctors, and restricts liberty. 
Lincoln’s conception was for freedom and liberty. The 
doctors’ plan is for domination, tyranny and fees. Her- 
bert Spencer declares that medical popery, which the 
doctors think is so defensible; is parallel to religious popery, 
which all Protestants think is so indefensible. Prof. Fran- 
cis W. Newman has also truly declared “to enact a medical 
code, or command a medical process, is usurpation—not legit- 
imate legislation, even viewed from the scientific side,” “and 
certainly,” as Prof. Dr. A. Wilder, of New York, remarks, 
“ when viewed from the standing-point of common right, or 
the principle of Republican government, it has no warrant 
or iustifleation whatever.” 
Hood advice was it that Gamaliel gave to the priests and 
Sadducees of his day, who were indignant that the apostles 
by their hands wrought signs and wonders, and healed the 
sick folks. Said Gamaliel, “Refrain from these men, and 
let them alone, for if this work be of men it will come to 
naught, but if it be of God ye cannot overthrow it.”—(Acts 
v: 38. IN THE HEALING ART. 
31 
Let me hope that the wise spirit of toleration and brother- 
hood which prompted this advice of the Hebrew counsellor 
and doctor of the law, will have weight with the legislators 
of Massachusetts, and will operate to prevent the enact- 
ment of an act which, like the Witch Statutes of two centu- 
ries ago, will bring certain disgrace on the name of Massa- 
chusetts, will withdraw health-giving energies, spiritual and 
angelic therapeutics from its citizens, and is sure to inflict 
oppression and persecution upon the useful and humble 
healers known as clairvoyants, spiritual mediums, healing 
mediums and magnetizers. 
Mr. Chairman, in behalf of and for the protection of the 
many remonstrants whom I represent, against unjust, un- 
equal and privileged class-legislation, I submit as an amend- 
ment to the Bill before you, and to any Bill which may be 
proposed to restrict, to regulate, or otherwise to interfere 
with the free practice of medicine in this Commonwealth, 
the following provisos, the same to be added to and made a 
part of this and any other Medical Bill that may be pro- 
posed, namely: 
“ Provided that the provisions of this Act shall not apply to spir- 
itual mediums, to clairvoyants, to healing mediums, nor to magnetic 
healers. % 
And further provided that every citizen of this State above the age 
of twenty one years, and of sound and disposing mind and memory, 
may employ for himself and in his family the medical aid and ser- 
vices of any person he may wish to employ, anything in this Act to 
the contrary notwithstanding.” 
Mr, Chairman and Gentlemen of the Committee, thank- 
ing you for your kind attention, I now close my argument 
in defence of healing and medical mediums, and for univer- 
sal freedom in the practice of the healing art, with the fol- 
lowing eloquent and convincing letter to the same points 
which I recently received from Dr. Buchanan, Professor of 
Physiology, Anthropology and Physiological Institutes of 
Medicine in the Eclectic Medical College of the City of New 
York: 
New York, Feb. 19th, 1880. 
Alfred E. Giles, Esq., Hyde Park, Mass.: 
Dear Sir—l earnestly hope the friends of medical freedom will 
not only defeat the attempt to legislate against the rights of the peo- 
ple, but will stamp this movement with such reprobation as will for- 
ever prevent its repetition. 
It is as fundamentally wrong in principle to attempt in any man- 
ner, by force of law. to restrict popular freedom of choice in medi- 
cine, as it would be to restrict the freedom of choice in religion. Med- 
ical freedom and religious freedom stand on the very same ground, 
and the Medical College has no higher right than the Theological 
Seminary to determine who shall save body or soul. It is shocking 
to think that descendants of those who left the Old World to escape 
from religious bondage should engage in the establishment of a sys- 
tem of medical bondage, which has been far more cruel and oppress- 
ive than that of the hierarchy. There is no physical suffering im- 
posed by the priesthood of an established church: but the physical 
suffering and misery imposed by a medical oligarchy have left a terri- 
ble record throughout Christendom, to which it would require a vol- 
ume to do justice. 
The practice of treating disease by bloodshed has been kept np 
throughout Christendom ever since the days of Galen, and is not yet 
entirely abandoned, although it was demonstrated over forty years 
ago in the most incontestable manner that every act of bleeding was 32 
CIYIL AND MEDICAL LTBEETY 
an assault upon human life, which impaired vitality and accelerated 
death. 
Upheld by law, medical schools have prolonged this outrage upon 
Nature, and endeavored to crush all who would introduce more 
rational systems. Bleeding was but ona of the cruel acts of violence 
against the laws of Nature, which have aggravated the mortality of 
disease in many cases and prevented the remedial power of Nature 
from effecting a cure. 
Until a very recent period, every consumptive was peremptorily 
handed over to death, unless saved by escape from the control of 
Allopathic physicians, and to assert the curability of consumption 
was to bring down scornful denunciation upon the daring medical 
heretic. With the same blind adherence to authority and tradition, 
cholera was treated with a mortality varying from twenty-five to 
sixty per cent., by the leaders of the medical profession—while it 
has been amply shown by American physicians who have thrown off 
the shackles of authority, that ninety-five per cent, can be cured by 
rational treatment, and that any mortality exceeding ten per cent, 
is a proof of ignorance and malpractice. 
The curability of cancer has also been denied even more positive- 
ly than the curability of consumption, and while its cure has been car- 
ried on by American physicians who exercise the professional free- 
dom of eclecticism, these improvements have been opposed and con- 
cealed from the rising generation of physicians by medical colieges, 
with the disastrous result of causing a mortality of half a million, 
four fifths of which would have been prevented by rational treat- 
ment. 
Can it be possible that such a system of medical malpractice, dog- 
matism and cruelty can receive any assistance from a republican 
legislature in perpetuating these enormities and crushing every ef- 
fort of philanthropy to save the victims of false doctrine and unfeel- 
ing practice from their prolonged sufferings? 
Can it bo possible that any legislative body will endeavor to make 
benevolence a crime and to uphold the power of an avaricious mo- 
nopoly against the influence of modem enlightenment and scientific 
reform? 
Such legislation, conferring exclusive privileges upon the pupils of 
medical colleges, even if those colleges represented an enlightened 
system of medicine, would be an invasion of one of the dearest and 
most inalienable rights of humanity—the right of doing our duty, 
the right of obeying God, the right of helping the unfortunate. If 
we have the right to help the suffering with bread and milk, we have 
no less clear a i ight to give help by healing herbs, by baths, by band- 
ages, by mineral waters, by electricity, and by the life of our own 
bodies given through the band, as it'was given by the early Chris- 
tians. 
The healing of the sick by the magnetism of the human body and 
soul is not only a right hut a duty—a duly from which no true Chris- 
tian can be free. To interfere with this right is to violate religious 
liberty, to put a penalty upon dutv, and place the legislation of man 
in opposition to the laws of (tod. 'We are exhorted in the Scriptures 
to cultivate and use those gifts of God, the healing power and the 
power of prophecy, and in the performance of this duty we may defy 
any law of human enactment, for he who makes or enforces such a 
law is the criminal, not he who obeys the law of God in giving relief 
to the suffering. No medical school or medical clique gave to the 
Christians of the Pentecostal churches the power or the permission 
to heal the sick, nor would their authority have been regarded for a 
moment by those faithful disciples and followers of Christ. 
There are errors and quackeries under all systems that exist, for 
human beings are always imperfect in their administration of princi- 
ples, hnt the errors and quackeries of dogmatic medicine are so 
enormous in amount that one of the highest authorities in the medi- 
cal profession of England, Dr. Forbes, confessed that the Allopathic 
system, which he had practiced, was of very little practical value, 
and there are many physicians beside Ur. Jennings, of Connecticut, IN THE HEALING ART. 
33 
who have, after ten or twenty years’ experience In the old school pro- 
fession, lost their faith, and almost or quite abandoned their use of 
drugs, not because medicines are useless, but because a false system 
of practice made them dangerous and destructive. 
I do not decry a rational, practical, liberal system of medicine that 
follows nature; on the contrary I have that faith which is never 
found in the Allopathic ranks, that it can alleviate or cine all human 
diseases. But I deny the right of any legislative bodv to deprive 
freemen of their choice in medical treatment. And I affirm that if 
any system is to be restrained by law it should be the system which 
has heretofore consigned to death all cancerous and consumptive 
patients, nearly one-half of the c mlera patients, and about one- 
fourth of the sufferers from pneumonia. Under Allopathic manage- 
ment forty years ago a drug store in active business was more de- 
structive to the health and life of the neighborhood than a grog-shop 
sending out its rum, whiskey and brandy. And lam sure that if a 
legislative committee were to inquire into the mortality of the drug 
business under Allopathic control at present, it would be proved that 
Allopathic drugs have been as destructive as alcohol, and as ur- 
gently need legislative supervision, if the legislature is to think for 
the people. 
In opposition to this destructive system, modern intelligence has 
developed methods that are absolutely safe and harmless. Legisla- 
tive power has been often used or invoked against Homeopathy, 
widen its fiercest enemies must acknowledge is absolutely harmless 
and safe. Equally safe has been the electrical treatment of disease 
and the hydropathic system, while the methods of animal magnet- 
ism, including clairvoyance and spirit-guidance, which were the 
methods of the primitive Christians, are not only absolutely safe but 
are purely and entirely beneficent, for they are simply the giving of 
life from the well to the sick, and as incapable of doing harm as a 
gift of water to the man dying with thirst. In every city of our 
country we can find those who have been healed by these natural 
methods, after the faculty had failed—the natural methods that were 
in vogue before the dawn of scientific medicine, and which still pro- 
duce results that are far beyond the power of the schools. 
A committee that would fairly investigate this subject would find 
thousands of cases in which clairvoyance had corrected the blunder- 
ing diagnoses of college graduates, and in which magnetic treatment 
had healed the quacked, worn-out and abandoned patients of Al- 
lopathy. 
Clairvoyants and magnetic practitioners are often assisted in their 
practice by the spirits of departed friends—departed physicians, who 
in spirit-life discover the follies of their earthly systems of practice, 
and not only uso medicine more wisely, but, having a deeper insight, 
become infallible in diagnosis. 
I do not speak of these tilings as a one-sided partisan, for I do not 
belong to the clairvoyant ranks, and I have been a member of the 
medical profession for forty-five years, and was one of the founders 
of the most successful medical college ever established in Cincinnati, 
in which I labored for ten years, during the latter half of which time 
I was its public representative as the Dean of the Faculty. I am 
still a medical professor in New York ; but I have never indulged in 
the bigotry of the profession, or discouraged those who, being happily 
endowed, are able to cure by the methods of nature without the aid 
of science. 
I have known the success of clairvoyants in diagnosis and pre- 
scription for many years, and I have seen successful practice in my 
own family by deceased physicians giving their directions through 
spirit mediums In private life. In the midst of my medical labors at 
Cincinnati, a servant girl in my family being disabled by a swelled 
and diseased ankle, was sent several times to the best hospital with- 
in reach, for surgical treatment, without any material improvement, 
when my wife consulted, through a mediumistic lady living near, the 
spirit of a deceased physician, her brother-in-law, and received di- CIVIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY.7 
rections different from anything known in medical authors, which 
made a very speedy and thorough cure. 
In another case, during my absence from home, the same spirit- 
physician, when consulted, corrected an erroneous diagnosis in the 
case of one of my sons, and prevented him from taking unnecessary 
and improper medicine presented by a respectable young physician. 
Such cases are abundant all over our country, and so far as my 
observation goes, I have never known an erroneous prescription or 
one of dangerous character given from the spirit-world, through 
those who have the refined interior powers that reach the minds of 
the departed. 
The accessibility to these spirit-influences and spirit-communica- 
tions is a part of man’s religious nature, by which he becomes accessi- 
ble to the influences of the Holy Spirit and to the Divine Influx, which 
ennobles humanity and renders the soul and body of the good man a 
temple for the Lord. 
To war against these benevolent ministrations from Heaven is an 
act of impiety, which may he natural in a dogmatic infidel to whom 
all hut matter is nonentity or superstition ; hut to cultivate all the 
refined and beautiful elements of the soul by which God and the 
angels are brought into humanity is a duty of the highest obligation, 
and no man or woman who prays in sincerity for the influence of the 
Holy Spirit will reject the influence and help of the “ ministering 
spirits ” of whom the Scriptures speak. 
But whether the legislator believes or disbelieves in God and his 
angels, he has no right to raise a sacrilegious hand against the per- 
formance of those sacred duties which religion imposes on the good, 
and which the angels assist by their inspiring presence. In all that 
I have said I am sure I have your concurrence, as well as that of the 
most enlightened thousands of Europe and America. 
, In haste, yours cordially, Jos. Bodes Buchanan. / ADDRESS BY ALLEN PUTNAM. 
Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Committee: 
I believe, and freely avow it, that Mr. Paine, the head petitioner, and 
a large majority of his associates, are high-minded and philanthropic, 
seeking to advance the public welfare, and not that of any profession 
or class. Our educated and diplomated physicians are as much 
aloof from undue selfishness and are as public spirited as any other 
class. lam here to meet honorable, philanthropic men on their own 
plane, and discuss this question of great public importance. 
The late Prof. Louis Agassiz, as you well know, held a very exalt- 
ed position among scientists, and Dr. Brown Sequard, I think, is 
classed by public estimate among our globe’s most eminent medical 
scientists and practitioners. I intend to argue against your granting 
the prayer of the petitioners, as embodied in the bill before you, 
mainly from data furnished by the two eminent men I have named. 
On the Ist of May, 1873, Prof. Agassiz lectured in Boston upon “ The 
Methods of Creation,” and soon after published the lecture in the 
New' York Tribune. A few years since I copied from that lecture, 
when preparing a pamphlet entitled, “ Agassiz and Spiritualism,” 
involving the investigation (of Spiritualism) by Harvard professors in 
1857. From that pamphlet, page 61, I will now quote. Agassiz says: 
“ Dr. Brown in a recent lecture in Boston, laid before his 
audience a new philosophy of mental powers. Through physiologi- 
cal experiments and study of pathological cases he has come to the 
conclusion that there are two sets of mental powers in the human or- 
ganism; essentially different from each other: the one our ordinary 
conscious intelligence; the other a superior power which controls 
our better nature; solves, sometimes suddenly and unexpectedly, our 
problems and perplexities; suggests the right thing at the right time, 
acting through us without conscious action of our own, though sus- 
ceptible of training and elevation—or perhaps I should rather say 
our organism may be trained to be a more plastic instrument through 
which this power acts in us.” Thus has said Sequard, as quoted by 
Agassiz, who goes on and adds: “I do not see why this view should 
not be accepted. By experiments Dr. Brown Sequard has satisfied 
himself that the subtle mechanism of the human frame—about which 
we know so little in its connection with mental processes—is some- 
times acted upon by a power outside of us, as familiar with that or- 
ganism as we are ignorant of it.” Thus teach Sequard and Agassiz 
—good scientific authority—yes, the best. 
Science, then, through the lips and pens of her most gigantic mas- 
ters, tells us that there are two sets of mental powers in the human 
organism; that one set, the superior set, is sometimes acted upon by 
a power outside of us os familiar (mark the expression)—as familiar 
with that organism as wc are ignorant of it. An intelligent power 
that must he, and not an owner of the body through which it acts. 
Therefore nature, or God in nature, has provided an instrumentality 36 
CIYIL AYD MEDICAL LIBERTY 
through which intelligences not robed in flesh can speak to and act 
upon us through mortal lips and organs. 
“ New Philosophy ” has strong claims for cognition by 
the scientific, especially by medical scientists. That philosophy may 
lead them to acquaintance with, to training and use of mental facul- 
ties wherethrough they may get higher medical knowledge, power 
and aid than their own “ordinary conscious intelligence,” their 
more external mental faculties, can possibly obtain. Very obviously 
too it will lead them into the domain where Spiritualism’s countless 
springs are sending forth their healing waters In unprecedented 
abundance. Well for them, and for diseased mortals, if they become 
medical students there. 
Agassiz said : “ We know so little of the human organism in its con- 
nection with mental processes.” That statement implies that he, 
Sdquard, and of course our schooled and experienced medical practi- 
tioners, know next to nothing at all about it. But eyes exist which 
can look the human system through from centre 1o surface, and 
powers who can report to us the results of clear visual inspection. 
About three years ago the spirit of my classmate and chum in col- 
lege—and my friend to this day, though his body has been entombed 
for years—Dr. Augustus A. Gould, long a highly respected, success- 
ful and scientific medical practitioner in this city, volunteered to 
tell me, through borrowed lips, that my wife’s mental ailment result- 
ed from ossification of the spinal marrow, which was not curable in 
her case, and threatened to bring on such violent insanity as would 
demand her commitment to some asylum; he however saw ground 
for hope, if I would care for and treat; her as he should from time to 
time advise, that she might be saved from such incarceration. 
During nearly two years, and until death of body released her 
spirit, I followed his advice and escaped necessity to place her in a 
hospital. My conviction Is firm that his advice—very singular in 
some of its requirements—was wiser and more helpful tlian embodied 
man’s medical science could have given. 
The bill before you, if enacted, will make the estimable lady 
through whom I received the advice a legal culprit, if I avail myself 
of her form for obtaining similar help in future. I say herfor'm, for 
she is unconscious of what comes through her from outside powers, 
so that yon may as rationally and much more humanely fine my pen 
for recording this account, than to fine her because of what flows 
through her at such times. 
Can you wonder, gentlemen, that I make an earnest appeal to you 
to give these petitioners leave to withdraw, so far as they ask you 
for power to fine Dr. Gould’s sensitive, living instrument, in a case 
where he must be the only possible culprit! Lawyers, drafting the 
bill, would have shunned that absurdity had their clients posted 
them adequately to the fair demands of the case. 
Do you wonder that I protest against putting any legal obstacle in 
the way of anybody’s getting help from outside powers whose fa- 
miliarity with the interior of the human system while alive is as 
great as every physician’s ignorance of it must be who is not clair- 
voyant? Will you abridge access to the higher available knowledge, 
and restrict us as far as you canto relative ignorance? At this 
dawning of a new and brighter era in medical science and practice, 
whose coming is, and has been through thirty years, harbingered to 
the people by the unprecedented multitude of human forms taken 
hold of and used by invisible doctors, and more recently harbinger- 
ed to scientists by Sdquard’s discovery—at this auspicious hour will 
you attempt to legislate us back into days of darkness and arbitrary 
rule? “Sumptuary laws,” says Webster, the lexicographer, “are 
abridgments of liberty and of very difficult execution. They can be 
justified only on the ground of extreme necessity.” 
Why have our doctors been so lone; neglectful of discov- 
ery? I think it is in harmony with the usual methods of the power 
which governs our world and Its inhabitants that they have left it 
unused hitherto. 
Can you teach the theologian theology ? the scientist science? the IN THE HEALING ART. 
37 
lawyer law ? or the physician physic? Rarely—very rarely. Any- 
thing.not generally known in their brotherhoods pertaining to their 
specialties is not worth hunting for—so their conduct usually says. 
Whatever lays outside of their mill-horse rounds rarely wins their 
careful inspection; more lowly persons, generally, in the methods of 
Providence, are,made the first recipients and appreciators of great 
revolutionizing and uplifting truths and facts. It was the common 
people, and not the learned, who of old, in Jerusalem, gladly heard 
the boy of twelve years who sat in the midst of the doctors, both 
bearing them and asking them questions, and creating astonishment 
by his understanding and answers. 
Christianity had to gain its first firm foothold amid the lowly; fish- 
ermen, publicans, sinners harlots, were among those to whom it was 
first presented. Such ones were less creed bound than the more cul- 
tured; less hampered by position; less covetous of respectability: 
more free to let intuition, or the superior set of mental powers, take 
rule within, and consequently better conditioned to sense and grasp 
the sublimity, potency and intrinsic worth of what came forth from 
the lips of the unlearned carpenter’s son. Nearly every Christian 
sect and broad philanthropic scheme has taken root first'among the 
lowly. My own meippry can take me back to days when Methodism, 
Universalhmi, Abolitionism, Homeopathy, all now in good repute, 
were more or less under the ban of the most cultured classes. To- 
day Spiritualism, mediums, magnetic healers, Spiritualists en masse, 
are under similar ban; were it not so 1 should distrust its supervis- 
ion by supernal wisdom and benevolence, which generally have sub- 
jected the world’s most extensive and helpful reformers to toil, buf- 
ferings. reproach, obloquy ami vilification. 
The demands of trained scientists are that all spirit phenomena 
shall be amenable to none other than such laws and methods of test- 
ing as they are familiar with, forgetting or ignoring the fact that 
spiritual things are spiritually discerned, and manifested through 
the application of other forces than such as mere mortals have 
knowledge of. Their external science—or the restrictions which 
that puts upon them, keeps their superior set of mental powers in- 
active where use of them is essential to fair and accurate discern- 
ment. Not to such would supernal wisdom put Infant Spiritualism 
out to nurse—they would soon crush all life out of it. Common peo- 
ple—wiser and kinder nurses—were selected to tend the young giant 
till he should need no protectors; could go forth in his own strength 
and compel acknowledgment of his claims to be an imigrant from 
supernal realms. 
I do not claim to be a scientist, but I stand on what a most emi- 
nent scientist has scientifically discovered, when I ask in solemn 
earnestness, and from the depths of my religious and humane nature, 
whether man in becoming reverence toward the great Author of Na- 
ture and Father of all men, can legislate to impede in slightest meas- 
ure resort to natural channels in some human frames wherethrough 
ailing mortals can get aid from outside intelligent powers as familiar 
with the interior of the living human form as mortals must necessa- 
rily be Ignorant of it? 
Why not as well restrict us to the employment of licensed gradu- 
ates from specific theological schools for curing the soul, as to do 
what is sought for in the bill ? Dear as the freedom is to choose my 
spiritual doctor, freedom to select who shall care for my body and 
mind is not less prized. You leave me free to select a doctor for my 
horse or dog. and would abridge the vastly dearer freedom to choose 
one for myself and family. In this age and land of growing freedom, 
under the government of the people, by the people, for the people, it 
is out of time and place. 
It is ungenerous, unwise, to abridge by law freedom to employ 
whomsoever each one prefers to administer to self or family in times 
of sickness, when faith and confidence in and sympathy with the 
physician are among the most helpful of all remedial forces ! Give 
me the humblest shoeblack, if I know him to be intuitive, sympa- 
thetic, cheering, and a battery from which may issue healthful ema- 38 
CIVIL AXD MEDICAL LIBEETY. 
nations, either willed or spontaneously—yes, give me such in my hour 
of sickness, rather than your most scientific physician, if much lack- 
ing in those properties. 
God’s original part in making a good physician is far greater than 
all which man can add thereto in any medical school; by no school- 
ing process can medical professors inject brains, or tact, or common- 
sense, or intuitive faculties, or sympathetic temperament, or good 
moral instincts, or health-engendering magnetisms into their stu- 
dents ; and if any graduate be licensed to practice who is much lack- 
ing in such properties, however great his scholastic attainments, he 
never can become the one-half of a genuinely good physician. 
Born doctors, born half-doctors, are vastly better than many whom 
nature’s journeymen finish off in medical schools. Therefore let tire 
God-made ones—all of them—have a fair free field in which to benefit 
mankind, through doing, without hindrance or fear of law, what they 
were originally organized and compounded to perform beneficently. 
Gentlemen of the Committee, do not the facts and considerations 
Eresented permit me to say, beware, lest by passing the restrictive 
ill before us, thereby suppressing some evil, you shut out also the 
very highest agencies active in our midst for outworking the very 
end which both the petitioners and myself are seeking, viz., the 
public good ? ARGUMENT OF EDWARD HAMILTON, ESQ. 
Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: As a remonstrant against the pas- 
sage of the extraordinary legislation proposed in this bill, I wisli to 
say a few words to you as a citizen of Massachusetts. Since 1630 ray 
ancestors have lived on the soil which is now our proud Common- 
wealth. I cannot find that they ever even went out of this State to 
marry, so that I believe I have a right to claim to be a Massachu- 
setts man; and, as both my grandfathers were eminent physicians, 
and several of my nearest relatives were of that profession, most of 
them members of the Massachusetts Medical Societv, and as I was 
brought up in the drug business myself, I think I have a right to 
speak on this question. Now, sir, I am one of those who believe in 
the doctrine of the fathers—in the doctrine of personal liberty. Ido 
not think you legislators sit here to take away the liberty of the citi- 
zen, but to protect your own and the liberties of those you represent. 
These sinuous encroachments on individual rights in our day are 
sapping the very foundation of our political structure. This Is 
not Massachusetts doctrine. [Applause.] It is the doctrine of the 
Spanish inquisition ; and I sometimes think there are men in Mas- 
sachusetts, yes, and women, too, who would, if they could, restore that 
dark and bloody code, so they could sit In judgment. [Applause.] 
This bill calls the examiners a ‘board of commissioners;” a com- 
mission ; and provides that it is to sit In judgment on the moral char- 
acter of citizens of this Commonwealth. It is an inquisition differ- 
ing from the Spanish only in degree. Moral character! Who are 
these men who set themselves up as standards of morals? Do they 
drink rum, smoke or chew tobacco, slander their neighbors, and 
thank God that they are not as other men ? [Applause and laughter.] 
Is the Executive Council, the Senate or the House to be the standard 
of morals? Or, it either, are Stickney, Chase, Pond, the Kev. Wins- 
low and the Rev. Sereno Howe to compose the commission? [Ap- 
plause.] What is the stand ird of morals to be adopted ? Must they 
be Christians, and must it be the Christian standard? If so, what 
becomes of the Jew, the Free Thinker, and people who are followers 
of other codes of morals than the Christian code ? [Applause.] Gen- 
tlemen, you are not here to establish Boards on moral character; 
that is out of your province. I understand, it is proposed to allow 
none to cure people except those who have a thorough knowledge of 
their business and calling. lam glad of it; it is a. good thing. 
But tills bill fixes a standard—true, rather a mixed standard—pro- 
viding that the Board shall he composed of members from the Massa- 
chusetts Medical, Homeopathic Medical, and the Eclectic Medical 
Societies. I believe they are not now allowed to join each other’s so- 
cieties, as they do not recognize each other as physicians of “ good, 
moral character ” [applause]—at least, not good enough, as physi- 
cians, to belong to one society; but as a Board, under this bill, they 
are compounded, mixed; and not only appear as, a Board with a 
1 thorough knowledge of their business and calling,” but of such good 
moral character that they, as a Board, are the standards of virtue. 
[Laughter and applause.] Who, in the medical profession,, claim 
they can cure all classes of diseases, and can impart to others the 
knowledge how to doit? This is just the question, exactly, which 40 
CIVIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY 
has for ages agitated civilization when discussing the subject. I 
have yet to learn that any one of the various schools of medicine 
claim they can cure all disease. Citizens not graduates of colleges 
cannot practice medicine. Why apply this rule only to those who 
cure disease? Why allow men who are not graduates of colleges to 
take part in any public affairs? [Applause.] Benjamin Franklin 
was not a graduate of a college, or Fulton, or Oliver Evans, or Good- 
year, or Bell, or Edison. [Applause.! Nor were Andrew Jackson, 
Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Henry Wilson or Nathaniel P. 
Banks, and hundreds of others of our ablest and best minds. [Ap- 
plause.] A college never produced a Shakspeare. From the bigotry 
displayed in this bill, one would think we had returned to the days 
when witchcraft was a capital offence here. [Applause.] I know, of 
my own personal knowledge, that the “ regulars ” cannot cure all 
classes of ailments, for twice in my life I have been 
GIVEN UP AND PRONOUNCED INCURABLE 
by them after consultations, and afterwards cured by persons not 
members of the societies, and who, under this bill, would not be al- 
lowed to practice in this State. [Prolonged applause.] One of the 
remonstrants to this bill is a gentleman long a resident of this city, 
who spent hundreds of dollars in seeking a cure of scrofula by mem- 
bers of the different schools. He had three scrofula sores on his neck 
—ulcers—seven or eight years ago. I went with him to a lady in this 
city, who cured him in three weeks [applause], and he, to this day, 
has never had a return of the malady. Shall Massachusetts people 
be deprived of these outside sources of salvation ? [Applause.] Now, 
sir, I would like to quote what Daniel Webster told an eminent physi- 
cian : “ Why, doctor, there is no such thing as science in your pro- 
fession or mine.” Why, sir, a few centuries ago, and a very few, ho- 
meopaths would have been hanged, and eclectics burnt at the stake. 
[Applause.] Even in the days of Shakspeare, and Bacon, and Queen 
Elizabeth, in that enlightened age, the fact of the circulation of the 
blood was not known, and powdered pearls and other gems among 
the wealthy, and toads’ eyes, serpents’ teeth, and similar talismans 
among the poor, were prescribed as medicines'and used to cure dis- 
eases. The old motto used to be, “ Fear-God and keep the bowels 
open.” [Uproarious laughter.] 
And that was about all there was to the practice of medicine in 
those days. Then came blood-letting; and how the old ancestors of 
ours poured out bowls full of blood as a sacrifice to the theories alone 
recognized in those days. [Great laughter and applause.] Then 
came the calomel period, which originated the practice of dentists 
ry, and the effects of which treatment follow many of our gene- 
ration. I think the present may be denominated the “morphine 
period ”in the old school practice. [Laughter and applause.] Why, 
sir, if we could only find these in strata, as we do the old red sand- 
stone, you would discover each period as distinctly marked with 
some new theory, some abandonment of preconceived notions, as is 
the track of time in the sandstones. [Applause.] How did the old 
school change their practice without either experimenting them- 
selves or adopting the experiments proven to be of value by positive 
evidence through the practice of people not belonging to their especial 
church and gospel of practice ? [Applause.] You may as well set up 
an exclusive church as an exclusive set of theories as to the practice 
of the healing art. 
But. gentlemen, there Is another phase to this question. What right 
has this or any legislature to say whom I shall or shall not employ as 
a physician? [Applause.] What right have you to say the person I 
employ shall he a man of “good moral character?” Permit me to 
refer these petitioners to the sixth section of the bill of rights: “No 
man. nor corporation, or association of men, have any other title to 
obtain advantages, or particular and exclusive privileges, distinct 
from those of the community, than what arises from the considera- 
tion of services rendered to the public; and this title, being in n su- 
ture neither hereditary nor transmissible to children or descendants IN THE HEALING ART. 
41 
or relations by blood, the idea of a man being born a magistrate, law- 
giver, ‘doctor’ or judge is absurd and unnatural.” Sam Adams 
meant, when he drew this clause, that “ every tub must stand on its 
own bottom.” The men of his day 
[applause]; and so it is provided that no medical or other “ associa- 
tion of men ” shall have any exclusive privileges over each and 
every citizen to do anything the constitution gives him power to do, 
or to do all those tilings he has reserved the right as a freeman to 
do. [Applause.] Article 4 says: “ The people of this Commonwealth 
have the sole and exclusive right of governing themselves.” But 
this bill proposes to come into my family and govern our medical af- 
fairs, and pour down our throats certain powdered pearls or toads’ 
eyes, because some medical society or association of men say that 
none but their exclusive association or practice shall be allowed 
either to kill or cure us. [Laughter and applause.] And this is called 
liberty, freedom, in Massachusetts, by some people. [Applause.] 
But if you should pass this bill, do you stop this evil? There are 
medical diplomas and associations other than those named in the 
long list before you—legal bodies chartered under the laws of other 
States; and persons, citizens of other States, belonging to them, in 
spite of your law, would have a right, under the constitution of the 
United States, to practice medicine in Massachusetts, for that con- 
stitution says [article 4, section 2]; “ Citizens of each State shall bo 
entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several 
States.” Therefore people now practicing here, citizens of Massa- 
chusetts now, would only have to become citizens of another State to 
continue practice here, in spite of the extraordinary provisions of this 
act, even were its propositions constitutional. I trust the petition- 
ers will withdraw this application, or, if not, that your honorable 
committee will give them leave to do it in your report upon this pe- 
tition. [Applause.] 
BELIEVED IN DEEDS, NOT IN DIPLOMAS ADDRESS OF CAPT. RICHARD HOLMES. 
Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Committee: lam not a physi- 
cian or the son of a physician, neither am I a practitioner at the bar, 
and In the few crude ideas that I may advance upon the merits of 
the Bill now before you I am confident I shall he exempt from the 
charge of being pecuniarily interested therein ; for I do not stand 
here as the paid advocate of any society or organization, or in the 
promotion of the peculiar sentiments of any sect or creed—neither 
in the personal Interest of any M. D. or “Quack ’’—but I should be 
recreant to the promptings of my own heart if, as a citizen of Boston, 
born and reared on the soil of Massachusetts, I did not, in sympathy 
with thousands of your constituents, enter my protest with theirs 
against your recommending to the Legislature for adoption any meas- 
ure tending to curtail the rights and privileges we have inherited, 
viz: the God-given principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of health 
and happiness, and of adopting any measures for preserving the lives 
of our dear ones that seemeth to us good. 
Mr. Chairman, I am a believer in the liberty of thought, of speech 
and of action, to the fullest extent, in politics, in religion, ay. in the 
practice and use of medicine also, and it matters not to me whether 
in your political proclivities you are Republican or Democratic, in 
your religious belief Protestant. Catholic, or neither, I would accord 
to you the freest, uninterrupted enjoyment of your opinion and be- 
lief, simply claiming for myself the right to exercise the same privi- 
lege. 
Gentlemen, in evidence before you last evening it was admitted by 
one of the oldest and most eminent physicians in Boston, that he had 
received more information from an old nurse than he ever obtained 
from any other party in his life. Well, I make no doubt that was 
true, for of the wise old nurses there are many, God bless them ! and 
while I concede to the Allopath the undisputed right to quaff ins 
pleasant draughts of jalap and calomel, and to the Homeopath the 
same right to partake of his miniature doses of aconite and bella- 
donna, God forbid that the State of Massachusetts should, by legis- 
lation, deprive me of the privilege of administering to my dear ones, 
when ill, the simple remedies prescribed by the wise, experienced, 
judicious, dear old nurse. 
You have been told that the old physicians were fast passing away; 
well, this is but the fulfillment of the laws of God and of nature. 
Massachusetts might perhaps by legislation hasten, but she can in 
no way retard the progress of their journey; it is an old and true 
saying, Mr. Chairman, that no man lives so great that the position 
he occupies cannot be filled when vacated by him, and I am confident 
there are those within the sound of my voice who will in their hearts 
reply “Amen ” as I from my heart say, “ Would to God some of them 
had passed on sooner,” for “incompetent and omnipotent in their 
own opinion ” might with propriety be inscribed upon many of their 
tombstones! 
Do the mechanical or mercantile interests of the State require at 
your hands legislation of this character? For instance, the old car- 
riage builders of Boston are fast passing from the stage of action, 
and from fear that some bungler will construct a carriage that will 
endanger your and my life or limb, providing we attempt to ride in 
it, are we to ask the Legislature to prevent any party from manu- 
facturing a carriage who has not a diploma or license from these CIVIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY. 
43 
pioneers of the trade? Why, gentlemen, is the telephone a myth, or 
the magnetic telegraph a humbug, because the inventors experi- 
mented with the electric spark without a license from Benjamin 
Franklin? 
Mr. Chairman, your fertile brain may work out an important In- 
vention, an improved water-wheel if you please, and the government 
protects your valuable invention by issuing to you letters patent 
under which you can obtain remuneration for the many laborious 
hours of active, useful brain-work, but do you come to the Legisla- 
ture of Massachusetts and ask them to enact a measure compelling 
the people to use your Invention whether they will or no, or in other 
words say to them they shall use no other? Not at all. Do these 
petitioners claim any new inventions? Have they any improved 
methods of eradicating disease? Have they any new ideas for the 
preservation of health worthy of merit? If so let them apply to the 
general government for protection by letters patent, in place of asking 
you to build around them a barrier to protect them from innovations 
that are making rapid inroads upon a heretofore lucrative profession. 
It has been suggested to you that there should be a clause inserted 
in the bill graduating the price for medical services, viz; A high 
price for those in affluent circumstances, a medium price for the 
middling classes, and a mere pittance for attending the poor. So 
amend and pass this bill, and God save the poor when sick, say I. 
It has been stated that we were in danger of being confined in insane 
asylums by the certificates of designing parties, not M. D.s ; is the 
influence of “ Quacks” so potent, then, that the M. D.s in charge 
of these asylums receive parties not proper subjects whether they 
will or no? 
It is a noticeable fact that the advocates of this Bill are, with but 
two exceptions, doctors. I expected they would he aided by more of 
the clergy, and perhaps a train of undertakers, and in my imagina- 
tion I pictured the advocates of the measure in the near future 
mourning over an occupation gone. 
It has been claimed that there have been many cases of malprac- 
tice among the poor by incompetent parties, yet they have signally 
failed to substantiate one single case where this malpractice was 
from others than regular M. D.s, and we all know that the majority 
of the extreme poor when sick are attended by dispensary doctors, 
who are graduates of the M. D.s’ cherished institutions. The certifi- 
cates of children’s deaths read last evening for the purpose of show- 
ing how illiterate were the parties who issued them, were a source of 
merriment to some, but it awakened in my memory vivid recollec- 
tions of the past, and brought up before me the death of my first- 
born son, and I could have added one more certificate as follows : 
“ Boy, aged ten months and fifteen days; cause of death, poison; 
administrator of the poison, Walter Channing, M. D.” The old man 
has gone to his long home; peace be to his ashes; these reminis- 
cences are unpleasant to contemplate, but the facts are so pal- 
pable that never can I efface them from my memory. 
1 The President of the Medical College told you last evening that he 
would not employ a man who said he could cure diseases ; that the 
Almighty God cured diseases, and to this my heart responded Amen; 
hut Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, Almighty God needs no earthly 
guardians, and it would he sacrilege for the Legislature of Massa- 
chusetts to attempt to dictate to him in what manner and through 
what instruments he shall exercise his miraculous powers! 
These petitioners have come here with no systematized plan, no 
unison of action, no fellowship between the several schools, and it is 
in evidence that those of the same school do not agree in the treat- 
ment of the same disease under similar circumstances, and when 
doctors disagree, Mr. Chairman, legislation will not harmonize them. 
It is within the memory of every one present that hut a few years 
since the Allopaths made a fearful onslaught upon the Homeopaths, 
hut failing in exterminating them, they have now in this matter taken 
them to their bosoms, and the Allopathic lion and the Homeopathic 
lamb have lain down together, and the little Eclectic child islead- 44 
CIYIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY. 
ing them, and they come to you not only for protection for the strip- 
ling and the innocent lamb, but for the would-be-devouring lion. 
Much has been said with regard to the importance of the members of 
the medical profession bearing a high moral character. With this 
sentiment I fully agree, and in response would say, Let those who 
are without guile cast the first stone. 
Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, we have no record confirmatory of 
the fact that the Good Samaritan had either a diploma or a license, 
and God forbid that you should recommend the enactment of any 
measure that will prevent me or my brother from binding up the 
wounds or administering to the wants of our suffering fellow-men. 
Report this Bill on no hearsay evidence, but if you deem it necessary, 
examine the past record of those whose individual interests are by It 
affected, and by their works judge ye them J ADDRESS BY BORING MOODY. 
Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Committee ■■ As the Bill “to 
regulate the practice of medicine ” in this Commonwealth is one 
deeply affecting the right of every citizen to elect his own assistant 
in time of need, and being one of the remonstrants, I ask your at- 
tention to some of the objections to the pi’oposed measure. 
Having heard the Bill read, and listened carefully to the argu- 
ments in its favor, I yet fail to see on what ground such a law as that 
proposed is called for. Have we not already laws enough on the 
subject? or has any new exigency arisen which demands new safe- 
guards for the public ? Or, rather, is it not felt necessary to guard a 
limited number of professional practitioners from the competition of 
non-professional ones? Some speaker has said : “ This Bill is not in 
the interest of the established societies, as ‘ quacks ’ bring grists to 
the mills of respectable physicians.” The truth lies more largely 
the other way—the respectable physicians bring grists to the mills 
of the quacks ; for if respectable physicians really understood the 
causes of diseases and their true remedies there would be no 
“quacks.” 
The Committee of the Social Science Association speak of “ medi- 
cal science,” and of “ persons duly qualified to practice medicine.” 
“Medical science” does not deal with dead corpses—the number of 
bones in the hand, the size of the liver, the location of the spleen, 
the distribution of arteries, &c.—these belong to the province of a 
real science ; but if there be such a science it deals with living be- 
ings. It must deal properly with the vital force with which living 
entities are endowed; and this force is an essence of which our 
medical science knows absolutely nothing, beyond its phenomena or 
the forms of its manifestations, as it not only eludes scalpel and for- 
ceps, but the most rigid examinations and analyses of microscope, 
crucible and retort. And yet all diseases result from disturbance of 
the normal relation of this subtle, unknown essence—life—with the or- 
ganic forms through which it manifests itself; and the sole aim of 
medical science is, or should be, to remove the disturbing cause and 
to restore the normal balance. 
And right here, at the very point, pith and marrow of the subject 
which this Bill proposes to regulate, “ medical science” is all at sea, 
and always has been, without fixed chart, compass, or any safe an- 
chorage ground ; and often wrecks its subjects on the rocks of death, 
in its ignorance of the true and safe currents of health and life. 
“Medical Science,” so called, has attempted to arrange the abnor- 
mal states of the human mind and body into classes, orders, genera, 
and species—as naturalists have plants and animals—as if they 
were living, organized beings, with well-defined forms, shapes, and 
clearly marked, distinctive characteristics; while really they are 
only different conditions of the mental and physical structure and 
relations, resulting from an infinite variety of causes, a few of which, 
with their modes of action, are known, while the great majority are 
still unknown. 
A condensed presentation of the different classes. &c.. of these dis- 
eases, as arranged by different learned doctors, will heli) to illustrate 
the conflicting opinions of different medical authorities, and the 
great need of further knowledge on this subject: Cullen gives 8 
classes, with 149 genera ; Sauvages, 10 genera ; Linnaeus, 
11 classes, 326 genera; Yogel, 11 classes, 560 genera; Sagar, isclasses, 46 
CIVIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY 
351 genera ; Macbride, 4 classes, 180 genera. Here is the difference 
between 4 and 13 in the number of classes, and the difference between 
149 and 560 in the number of genera, while Dr. Good makes C classes, 
with subdivisions into orders, genera and species, altogether too 
complicated for a brief statement. The present condition of medical 
practice, with its allopathic, hydropathic, homeopathic, eclectic, 
hygienic, botanic, Thompsonian, and I know not how many other 
modes of treatment, with thousands of patent medicines, new and 
old, with numerous other remedies, constantly in use, shows the utter 
lack of ascertained knowledge on this subject; wherein everybody, 
even our most learned professors, are only groping and feeling their 
way in the dark. 
If the practice of medicine rested upon such established and well- 
known principles as justly to entitle it to be called a science, these 
divisions and controversies could not arise. For real science is never 
divided against itself, and never quarrels about anything. See how 
kindly and sympathetically men work in geology, botany, zoology, 
chemistry, mechanics, physics. And even in astronomy, when it be- 
came known that the sun was the center of the system, controversies 
came to an end; and in law. how little there is comparatively of 
conflict. It is only when people enter the regions of the unknown, 
when they get into the dark and lose their way, that they begin to 
dispute and wrangle, and divide into conflicting and dogmatic sects, 
and enact laws to fine and imprison dissenters, and coerce con- 
formity. And here, surely, we are groping blindly in the dark. 
Therefore while I am glad that this device for “ regulating the prac- 
tice of medicine ” did not originate with either of the medical socie- 
ties, I am equally sorry that they should lend their sanction to it. 
It was quite lately that the largest of these societies brought sev- 
eral of their most sincere and conscientious members to trial, judg- 
ment, condemnation and expulsion, for practicing according to the 
formularies of another; and now, as Pilate and Herod were made 
friends when there was a just man to crucify, so all three of these 
societies unite for the purpose of driving from the Stale, or fining and 
imprisoning all who shall dare to practice the healing art without 
first having obtained their sanction and approval. 
I am grieved that the Social Science Association should have initial 
ted this movement, or given it any countenance whatever. Science 
is always out on voyages of exploration and discovery; it throws its 
doors and windows wide open to all light and knowledge; and it 
reaches no conclusions on any subject until it can learn no more, and 
even then holds all of its opinions or conclusions subject to revision. 
But here the American Social Science Association proposes to put 
up legal bars, and to padlock them with the penalties of fine and im- 
prisonment against all who shall search after and apply their knowl- 
edge for healing the sick outside of certain especially prescribed 
limits. 
I certainly had been led to hope for better things from this Asso- 
ciation. I had believed its conduct would have been guided by a 
broad, comprehensive spirit of inquiry and research on all subjects, 
instead of this narrow foreclosure on the important and warmly con- 
tested question of medical treatment. But it has given us all notice 
that when we are sick we shall not pay any one to come and lay heal- 
ing hands upon us who has not first been approved by these medical 
societies. 
It seems to me I have right of unlimited choice in the premises, 
and to elect such as may best serve my needs, as freely as I do my 
shoemaker, blacksmith or tailor, and to be my own judge as to wheth- 
er I am benefited, without the meddlesome intervention of either 
medical society or license commissioner. 
The phrase—“ persons duly qualified to practice medicine’’—has 
heeu frequently used. From our ignorance of the causes of diseases, 
and their true remedies, if there are such, there are no persons duly 
qualified to practice medicine, upon any foundation of positive knowl- 
edge, hardly more than a blind man is duly qualified to fudge of the 
nature and properties of light; and so, if a “ quack” is defined as an IN THE HEALING ART. 
47 
empiric—one who pretends to knowledge—who, on this subject, has 
right to claim exemption from the title? 
Only a few years ago the “regulars” of the Massachusetts Medical 
Society hurled the epithet at all practitioners of whatever class, or 
degree of knowledge, or measure of success, outside of their special 
school; and to-day, while they are willing to cooperate with the Ec- 
lectic and Homeopathic schools, for the purpose of imposing a re- 
strictive law upon others, they refuse to consult or hold any medical 
communion or fellowship with them, and still regard and treat all 
others as “ quacks.” 
“Is,” asked our excellent brother, the bishop, in his plea, “the 
medical profession to hold its own as a learned profession?” And 
he spoke of the need of legislation. If that profession is founded on 
the rocks of truth, it will need no legal bolstering; if not, all tne 
statutes of all tire legislatures in the country, with Congress thrown 
in, cannot help it to “ hold its own” against the progress of discov- 
eries in biology and its relations which are being made. 
Within my memory the “ regular Old School ” physicians would al- 
low their patients only the least possible quantity of water during 
the most burning fever ; with this disease a man in my neighborhood 
was very sick, and continually calling for water, of which his physi- 
cian would allow him but a few drops at long intervals. A neighbor 
came to watch with him, and requested him to keep still until all 
others were asleep, which he did, when his friendly watcher went to 
a spring near by, from which he brought a pailful of water, of which 
he let the sick man drink as he desired. Before morning he fell into 
a quiet sleep, with a profuse perspiration, and when his physician 
called the next day he found his patient suddenly on the high road to 
recovery. 
The man who administered the water was “ a quack,” and the 
other was “duly qualified to practice medicine.” So the Hydro- 
pathic “ quacks ” had to come and tell scientific doctors that there is 
nothing else in the world so good to put out a fire as water. And the 
Homeopathic “ quack ” had to come and tell them that the practice 
of medicine had a more intimate relation to the vital principle than 
they had thought of—that there is a living force in these human 
bodies which cannot be tinkered up with so much bismuth, antimony, 
calomel, and the like, as you may mend an old teapot with pewter. 
Then the Eclectic “quack” had to tell them that there were more 
things in heaven and earth than were, or could be, dreamed of in 
their philosophy, or in any narrow school of medical guess-work, 
which would not even guess outside of certain pent-up limits—that 
the wisest way is to seek after and apply truth in this, as in all 
other relations. 
Indeed there is no end to the ♦'♦ligations the world is under to 
“quacks”: Galileo, Columbus, Luther, Fox, Fulton, and men of 
their kind, despising the narrow limits, prescriptions and conven- 
tionalisms of their times, and under loads of ridicule, contempt, ob- 
loquy and reproach, heaped upon them by ignorance, bigotry and in- 
tolerance, have been the explorers, discoverers, inventors and re- 
formers of the past; and those whom the regulars in medicine have 
scoffed at as “ quacks ” have ever been, and will continue to be, the 
leaders of the race out of the quagmires and miasms of Ignorance and 
folly up to the sound ground of knowledge, wisdom and health- 
Is not this proposed movement reactionary, and bordering close on 
despotism ? The movers have gone outside the State, even to Canada 
and Texas, in search of precedents, and have imported an expert 
from New Hampshire—which Daniel Webster said “ is a good State 
to emigrate from”—to enlighten us on the subject. But what have 
Texas, Canada, or even New Hampshire, to tell us that wc did not 
know as well, if not better, than they did before? The gentleman 
from New Hampshire tells us the restrictive law works well in his 
State. Works well for whom? Why, for the regularly regulated 
doctors, of course ; for when one who refuses to be regulated comes, 
and puts out his sign, they have only to serve him with notice to quit, 
on pain of fine and imprisonment, and he decamps at once. “ Works 48 
CIVIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY 
well,” of course it does ! it leaves the field clear to the duly qualified 
“ quacks ”—all marked and branded by the statute—who remain. 
The same gentleman tells us they would not be troubled so much 
with “quacks” but for Boston. Well, Boston has troubled New 
Hampshire people with other things besides its “quacks.” It has 
been largely responsible for building up its manufacturing towns, 
railroads, and of developing its material resources; and it has got a 
little common-sense to spare in regard to the true conditions of ac- 
quiring knowledge—to wit: to leave all questions open to free exam- 
ination, experiment and trial; and especially such mooted ones as 
the causes and cure of disease. And so a few Boston “quacks” 
might help deliver New Hampshire from a part, at least, of Its igno- 
rance. I know this might be distasteful to those who work the State 
like a machine—by statute. 
As this gentleman from New Hampshire took evident delight in 
exposing the ignorance of the number of bones in the hand, etc., of 
a Boston “ quack,” brought up for examination; and as this Bill 
deals especially with the treatment of diseases, let us-in turn exam- 
ine the examiner on that subject: 
Ques.—What is the specific cause of any specific type of fever? 
Aks.—l don’t know. 
Q.—lf fever is caused by malaria, what is the specific character of 
that malaria? 
A.—l don’t know. 
Q.—What proportion of malarious matter must there be relatively 
to the oxygen, nitrogen and carbonic acid of the atmosphere, in order 
to induce typhus? 
A.—l do n’t know. 
Q.—What proportion in order to induce typhoid ? 
A.—l don’t know. 
Q.—Why will one person be attacked by fever in the same atmo- 
spheric conditions, and another escape? 
A.—l do n’t know. 
Q.—Why is one person susceptible to fever in a given condition of 
the atmosphere, while another is not ? 
A.—l do n’t know. 
Q.—Can you tell in advance what state of the atmosphere will cause 
fever in any particular state of the system? 
A.—l cannot. 
Q.—Can you tell in advance what condition of the body will induce 
fever? 
A.—l cannot. 
Q.—Can you cure fever as certainly as you can stop a tootbache by 
pulling it out ? 
A.—l cannot. 
Q.—Can you ever be certain that you can cure fever, diphtheria, 
small pox, or any other disease? 
A.—l cannot. 
Q.—What is the cause of measles? 
A.—l don’t know. 
Q.—Two persons are exposed to measles at the same time and un- 
der the same conditions—or to the small-pox. Why may the disease 
attack one, and the other escape ? 
A.—l do n’t know. 
Q.—Do you know of anything that will cure measles or small-pox? 
that is, that will stop their progress in any given stage of the disease, 
and restore the patient to health? 
A.—l do not. 
Q.—What causes mumps? 
A.—l do n’t know. 
Q.—Why do mumps sometimes affect only one of the parotid glands 
at a time? 
A.—l do n’t know? 
Q.—Why do mumps destroy the virile power of their subject ? 
A.—l do n’t know. ■■■■- - • - IN THE HEALING AKT. 
49 
Q.—Do you know of anything that will cure mumps—stop their pro- 
gress at once? 
A.—l do not. 
And so we might pursue the inquiry in regard to other diseases 
with the same results. And yet, doubtless this gentleman is a highly 
educated physician and knows as much as any of them. And when 
questioned all must admit that their modes of treatment—excepting 
in cases of surgery—are almost, if not wholly, empirical. They must 
feel their way along in the dark, experiment and guess; and on ac- 
count of the Influence of “ quackery” many of them have ceased to 
he tied down to their old formularies. 
And here, upon this groundwork of ignorance, contradiction and 
absurdity, the Social Science Association proposes to establish a law 
to regulate the practice of medicine 1 The first and highest duty of 
the physician is, to teach people how not to be sick, so as not to 
make a trade of their calamities. And the duty of all is, first, to 
learn more, so as to know a little what we are about. It was in the 
depths of religious blindness and ignorance that laws were framed to 
coerce conformity and punish dissent. The demand of strict justice 
Is that we hands off, and let all modes of treatment stand by their 
merits, or fall by the want of them. It is only ignorance that ruts to 
the law for protection. Science does not need, nor does it ask my 
legal protection against Ignorance, any further than to keep I*o> ng- 
oted and violent hands off. ADDRESS OF A. S. HAYWARD. 
To the Committee on Public Health Mass. Legislature : 
The petition of the remonstrants against the enactment of a law to 
regulate the practice of medicine is signed by more than three thou- 
sand citizens of the State of Massachusetts, and this number might 
have been increased tenfold had sufficient time been had for obtain- 
ing them ; but these were obtained within ten days, and sufficiently 
show that the people do not desire to have their liberties restricted 
by any such law as is proposed. The persons who have signed this 
petition largely represent a class who recognize the power of certain 
subtile invisible forces in Nature, and believe they can be made avail- 
able in the eradication of disease from the human system, and they 
claim an inalienable right to the use and exercise of those powers. I 
oppose the Bill from principle, and for the following reasons : 
Ist. The people do not ask nor require medical guardianship, and 
especially by guardians who want to hold a power over the people 
to compel them to employ them when sick. 
2d. There are several hundred clairvoyant and magnetic physicians 
in the State in successful practice, and the people employ them when 
sickness afflicts them ; and some of the most intelligent families of 
the State are among their patients. 
3d. The combined movement to-day appears like an attempt to in- 
terdict and destroy the practice of these persons, unless they are 
willing to continue it without fee, and use no sign, neither advertise to 
cure the sick, as doctor or physician. 
4th. The M. D.s do not seem willing that success in curing shall be 
recognized as a standard for the people to judge from. Dr. Lyman 
stated before your committee that the Almighty made the cures, and 
not the doctors, and that he learned from a nurse one of the most 
valuable things in the medical practice he ever knew. He afterwards 
said that a cancer never was cured. Of course it will be inferred 
from this last statement that Dr. Lyman considers the Almighty to 
be limited in his power to heal. I have just received a report from a 
Cancer Hospital in London, England, which I will place before your 
committee, that you may judge whether the statement of Dr. Lyman 
as to the incurability of a cancer is true or false. 
Doubtless there are many persons healing the sick by and through 
a force or power that they have no knowledge concerning, and can- 
not comprehend in full, any more than they can the design and ulti- 
mate of human life. Cures are said to have been made in Bible times, 
by persons who had no medical diplomas, and I have no reason to 
doubt the statement, as we are daily witnessing in this age seemingly 
miraculous cures, in cases that have baffled the skill of our most 
highly educated M. D.s. 
In all the States where a regulation law has been enacted the peo- 
ple want it repealed, and yet the favored M. D.s claim that the law 
works well. Which report shall we believe? In Illinois they admit 
that magnetic treatment (manipulating) is legitimate, but if I go into 
that State to practice I must pay a license of $1,200 yearly, be forced 
to leave the State, or contest the constitutionality of the law. Two 
years ago I visited Nashua, N. 11., and had eight patients, and if any 
person had felt so disposed they could have caused my arrest, and 
fined me $5OO for each patient, the informer getting $2OOO for the mean 
act. 
Gentlemen of the Committee, is it any wonder that the people cry CIYIL AXD MEDICAL LIBERTY. 
51 
out, Give us liberty ! in regard to employing the mode of treatment and 
the person using it? It matters not whether the person we employ is 
educated or uneducated, provided he possesses that natural ability 
and healing power such as we read of in the Bible, but which when ap- 
plied in our day'and generation elicits the cry God does not work in 
that way to-day—while the facts prove that he does in almost 
every household. The laws already upon our statute books (if en- 
forced) will punish abortionists, etc., whether in or out of the pale of 
the regular practice, also the same In malpractice; and as far as 
“swindling” is concerned, all persons engaged in the medical pro- 
fession are subject to the general law. The present movement seems 
like a step toward uniting Church and State, and when we see able 
talent engaged in advocating the restrictive law, calling to their as- 
sistance the aid of Bishops, and other religious teachers, it is time 
for the people to be aroused. How would it look for M. D.s to offer 
their services to the clergy to regulate the religious teachings of the 
dav? It is not strange, therefore, that men and women voluntarily 
come forward to unmask the schemes and expose the plans and 
purposes of a class of men who, for their own personal pecuniary 
interests, seek, under the pretence of protecting the people, to bind 
them with the fetters of a proscriptive law. TESTIMONY OF JOSHUA NYE* 
To the Chairman of Committee on Public Health, State of Masses 
chusetts : 
All my life, till within eleven years, I have been a rigid, radical 
disciple of the “ old school ”of medical practice. During the sum- 
mer of 18G9 I had a very violent attack of sciatic rheumatism, while 
on a visit to West Point, New York. The surgeon of the post was 
called at once, and he and his assistant visited me several times a 
day for about a week, without affording me any relief except while 
under the influence of epidermic injections. ‘Finally the surgeon 
advised me to make an effort to get home to Maine, giving it as his 
opinion that I would not recover for a year, at least. After suffering 
untold misery, I succeeded in reaching- my home in about three 
weeks from the commencement of my sickness. 
I was upon my back for thirteen weeks longer, under the care of 
eminent allopathic physicians, without obtaining any permanent re- 
lief. I then decided to go to Boston for medical treatment. I saw 
in the morning papers the card of a well-known Boston “ magnetic 
physician,” and by the very earnest persuasions of my wife, con- 
sented to call him, and see what he could do. By the application of 
his hands he took away all pain, and effected a permanent cure. I 
remained perfectly free from all pain till July 4th, 1879, when, being 
exposed, I took a Violent cold, when the same kind of pain came on 
again in another part of my body. For nine days and nights I en- 
dured agony not to be described, attended by a first class physician 
of the homeopathic school. I obtained no permanent relief. 1 then 
sent a telegram to the same magnetic physician in Boston, asking 
him to visit me. He did so, and relieved me of all pain, and 1 have 
been free from it to the present lime. I could give you many other 
cases of cures in Maine, as remarkable as my own, effected by this 
same physician and others of his school. Now I trust you will do 
nothing to drive such healers from practice, but let the people have 
the privilege of selecting their own physicians, and not give a 
monopoly to any one or more classes of men. I feel that I, in com- 
mon with all citizens of the United States, have a personal interest 
in this matter, and that “ Good old Massachusetts ” will be the last 
State to deprive the people of their Constitutional rights. 
In closing this brief statement I will relate another instance of 
cure: Ten years since my wife discovered a sclrrhns tumor in her 
left breast—at any rate, several physicians in this State pronounced 
it to be such. Wishing to make sure of the case, I went with her to 
Boston and consulted with two physicians of the “ Old School ” who 
are as well known and stand as high as any physicians in this coun- 
try. Without any hesitai ion both of them pronounced it scirrhus tu- 
mor., and advised that the left breast should be amputated within 
ten days. On her return to the hotel she was advised to consult a 
magnetic physician before submitting to the knife. She did so, and 
in less than three months he completely removed the tumor by ma- 
nipulation and medicine given internally. She has been perfectly 
free from all signs of tumor since. At the end of the three months I 
called with her to see one of the doctors who advised the amputation. 
He made an examination, and said he “would not advise amputa- 
tion now.” 
* At the time these cures were effected an account of the two cases, from 
the pen of Hon. Neal Dow, was printed In the Congregationalist, under 
the caption of “What is It ? Can the Doctors Tell?” PLEA OF PROF. CHARLES WESLEY EMERSON.: 
Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: I wish before speaking on this pro- 
posed Bill, to define my individual position by saying, first, I do not 
practice medicine, neither do I wish to, nor have I any personal 
friend practicing or wishing to practice, whom this Bill would in the 
least affect. I am not herein the interests of any person or class. 
Many of the members of the State Homeopathic Sociely, as well as 
very many members of the Eclectic State Medical Society, together 
with some of the members of the Massachusetts State Medical Socie- 
ty, have petitioned you not to recommend legislation on this sub- 
ject. But Ido not represent any of these societies, nor do I repre- 
sent the Spiritualists who oppose this Bill. lam not a Spiritualist, 
and have no belief in it whatever. I object to this Bill because it is 
opposed to the well-being of the people of this Commonwealth, by 
impeding progress in the at t of curing disease. 
The President of the Massachusetts State Medical Society stated 
to this Commitlee that the most useful information he had ever re- 
ceived was given him by a nurse. We have only begun to learn the 
practice of medicine. Scarcely any branch of it can be called exact 
science. There are some things to be learned yet, even in anatomy; 
and much in physiology. Progress in these two departments we 
must necessarily look to the learned for, but it does not follow that 
these learned scientists will be graduates of any medical college. 
The facts go to show that a large number of the discoveries in these 
sciences have come from men who are not M. D.s. Some of the 
names that stand the highest on this continent, and on the other, as 
discoverers and authors, whose books are looked upon as the best 
authorities contributing to the knowledge of anatomy and physiolo- 
gy, have never graduated from any medical college. Yet this Bill, if 
Eassed, will prevent such men not only from practicing medicine, 
ut even debar them the privilege of an examination. It might seem 
to those who have only superficially examined this Bill that it is at 
least an intended stimulant to education. But it is not even this; 
for it will not permit a man to practice on the ground that he can pass 
a creditable examination on all the branches supposed to be requi- 
site to a thorough medical education, for it will not even examine 
the candidate unless, in addition to his knowledge and fitness, he 
also presents the board of censors a diploma from some approved 
medical college. Disguise it as they may, the regular M. D.s of Mas- 
sachusetts are simply asking for a monopoly, by the guarantee of a 
legislative enactment. 
Progress in anatomy and physiology, as we have stated, comes in 
the nature of things from the learned, but the progress in therapeu- 
tics (the meaning of which Webster defines “that part of medicine 
which respects the discovery and application of remedies for dis- 
eases ”) has, and still continues to, come from the unlearned. The 
materia medica is almost entirely made from the discoveries of the 
unschooled. An entire change in the treatment of diseases has 
taken place in all schools during the last fifty years. Prior to that 
time the human system was literally loaded with mineral poison by 
the doctors, they vainly hoping that disease was not merely lack of 
health, but an entity, that could be killed by pouring deadly mineral 
poison into the body of the patient on the one hand, and on the other 
drawing away all the good blood in the arteries. Samuel Thomson 
was the first successful innovator upon this horrid system of prac« 54 
CIVIL AYD MEDICAL LIBERTY 
tice ; and he was an uneducated farmer, who could barely write his 
name. The ignorance in the learned profession was so great at that 
time concerning the remedial properties to be found in the vegetable 
kingdom, from which Thomson drew all Ids medicines, that upon 
Thomson’s losing a patient he was arrested for willful murder ; and 
at his trial the poison of winch the patient was said to have died was 
brought forward by a regular M. D. of tins same school in whose in- 
terest they would have you pass this Bill. Upon examination it was 
discovered to be the harmless root of marsh-rosemary, used in mak- 
ing common candy at the present time. The cures this man wrought 
wherever he went seemed, In contrast with the success of the regu- 
lar practitioner, to be little less than miraculous. The news of ids 
wonderful cures spread abroad, not by his advertising them, but it 
was told from man to man. The people rejoiced in the new light, the 
physicians tried to suppress him, but the people would have him. At 
last the doctors said, if the people will be doctored by this quackery,' 
viz., roots and herbs, we cannot lose our practice; and lienee we are- 
compered to sit at the feet of this ignorant old “ quack,” and learn 
what he gives, and how he perforins these wonderful cures. And so 
Thomson’s remedies are now used by every medical school, though 
they still decry his name. And these compounds of Thomson’s, and 
his many discoveries, to the number of more than one hundred, are 
sold by all druggists in America and Europe. His system now is a 
part of the recognized system, even among the members of the Mas- 
sachusetts State Medical Society. 
The Water Cure system has a similar history. So of all the differ* 
ent elements that now compose the regular practice. Every one was 
fought in its turn by the regular schoolmen ; but the people were 
benefited, and therefore, notwithstanding it has ever been made 
scandalous to employ a person outside the regular practice, yet “ all 
that a man hath will he give for his life.” So these systems tin* regu- 
lar schools were compelled to adopt, or else be left among the fossils 
of the past. 
I brought before you a member of the family of the far-famed 
“ natural bone-setters.” For two hundred and fifty years their sys- 
tem, called the “ rotary ” system, was fought back by the colleges 
of medicine, and kept out of the regular practice until the people 
were determined to have this graceful and easy method of bone- 
setting ; and then the regulars were forced to adopt it; and again 
the schoolmen were compelled to move forward a step. Now they 
say, “Do not let any more men practice outside the regular system, 
for we are tired of moving on. We wish to draw our robes about us 
and rest. We might have been resting these hundreds of years had 
it not been for the ‘ quack ’ compelling us to learn first this improve- 
ment in medicine and then that, or else lose our practice and stand one 
side and see the money all go into the pockets of the man who cures, 
he having plenty and to spare, while we starve on our ‘sheepskin.’ ” 
It seems, at first thought, very strange that these marvelous im- 
provements in treating disease, and even in bone-setting, should come 
from persons who have not read, and can give no scientific name to 
the diseases they cure, or even tell the anatomical names of the 
bones they set; yet these are the facts, and not even the promoters 
of this Bill will dare attempt a denial of them. But this seeming 
eccentricity of nature is not alone confined to discoveries in the 
healing art, but is true of nearly all the improvements. Common 
people give us our improvements, and the schoolmen spend their 
time in giving Greek and Latin names to these improvements, 
and building metaphysical theories concerning them. George Ste- 
venson, the inventor of the locomotive, could scarcely read—he was 
a poor, ignorant collier. He knew nothing of the laws of mechanics, 
never heard of a school of Technology. Yet nobody thought the 
less of his invention because he could not pass an examination con- 
cerning the very principles of mechanics which he had been apply- 
ing, Even Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph, was not a 
scientist, and could not have passed a creditable examination before 
any college board of examiners; yet we do not think the less of these IX THE HEALIXG ART. 
55 
wires which, liko so many nerves, bring into harmony all the fami- 
lies of man. 
Again, disguise it as the friends of this proposed Bill may, the 
measure is a proposal for class-legislation! The immortal Lincoln 
said, “This is a government of the people, by the people, and for 
the people.” This Bill proposes to govern the people for the doctors, 
and by the doctors. It is even worse than that; it proposes to put 
this monopoly, not into the hands of all the educated, graduated 
physicians, but into the hands of those who happen at this time to be 
members of tire different State Medical Societies. 
At this point I wish to refer to the physician brought here, by the 
petitioners of this Bill, from New Hampshire, who was used for the 
purpose of making you believe that Massachusetts is full of “quacks.” 
He read you quite a lengthy letter from a physician residing in Con- 
cord. The whole letter, if seen in the light of unvarnished facts, 
will show your honorable body who started this movement to legis- 
late in favor of certain physicians, as some States have essayed to 
do, and which other States, when importuned, refuse to do, among 
the latter Wisconsin being entitled to honorable mention—a State 
which, while this hearing has been going forwai’d, has nobly re- 
fused to legislate in favor of a class of men who are unable to con- 
vince the people that they are of sufficient value to the community 
to entitle them to patronage. The points in this letter, sent by one 
physician from New Hampshire and read to you by another, were to 
the effect that an attempt had been made to repeal the law in New 
Hampshire by some of its citizens, or, rather,, by Massachusetts 
“ quacks,” together with a few persons in New Hampshire who had 
sent in dead men’s names on the petition for a repeal! Notice the 
charge, gentlemen, which a physician in Concord makes against the 
Inhabitants of his own State without any warrant or proof. What 
will the citizens of New Hampshire say when they hear what a physi- 
cian in their capital has charged them with? This unfounded state- 
ment shows the true spirit of those who are interested in the mak- 
ing and perpetuity of such sumptuary laws. This writer would 
leave an entirely different impression from what is correct on your 
minds, in saying that a man from Lebanon tried to get this law re- 
pealed. and during the last session was seen hanging around the 
State House, “button holing” the members ; and that certain law- 
yers, who were members of the Legislature, were supposed to hold 
retainers’ fees in their pockets. He went on to insinuate that money 
had been raised by Massachusetts “ quacks ” to do all these things, 
saying that somebody had said, in the steam-cars, to somebody else, 
that he would give one thousand dollars to get the law repealed. He 
further stated that the agitation against their New Hampshire law 
had been started by one Hayden in Massachusetts, etc., etc. 
Now while all this is not precisely legitimate to the subject under 
discussion here, yet on the ground that the petitioners have seen fit 
to present this testimony for want of better, t shall attempt to show, 
by a true recital of this whole affair, what the real animus of these 
law-movers is. This physician from New Hampshire said at the 
time the repeal was attempted in that State, that talent was im- 
ported from abroad, insinuating that this wonderful thousand dollars 
given by somebody, nobody knows who, in addition to its buying up 
members of the New Hampshire Legislature, also sent this “ talent” 
to advocate the repeal. The facts about this whole matter, gentle- 
men. are as follows : The law above mentioned had been in force in 
New Hampshire for about two years, when a member of the Legisla- 
ture from Lebanon, who was not a doctor of the “quack ” order, or 
any other, but a most estimable merchant, a noble, high-minded and 
genuine lover of humanity, discovering certain great wrongs that had 
been permitted under this doctors’ monopoly, presented a Bill for a 
repeal of said law, and being an old and true friend of mine, and 
knowing that I saw the inhumanity of this law in the light in which 
he saw it, wrote me, asking if I would come to Concord and assist 
him In presenting the petition for a repeal; telling me there was no 
money to be paid, but if I would come and give my services in the 56 
CIVIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY 
name of humanity, to come. He did not know when the hearing 
would take place. Days went by and weeks ; we could not under- 
stand the reason for the delay ; at last a day was appointed, and we 
went, and found the city literally filled with doctors from all parts of 
the country. They had, on the day appointed for the hearing, a 
meeting of all the Societies in the State ; then it dawned upon us 
why the delay for the hearing had been so long. These doctors ap- 
pointed their speakers, and such a flocking of doctors to the State 
House could only be accounted for on the ground that their craft was 
in danger. There were lawyers on the Committee before which the 
hearing came, and these lawyers reported in favor of a repeal, after 
hearing the argument on both sides. The writer of the letter I have 
just referred to as being sent by one physician and read before you 
by another, was one of the speakers appearing in favor of the New 
Hampshire law. One of the doctors came forward at that time, and 
declared that a “ quack ” in Massachusetts said he would give one 
hundred thousand dollars to repeal the law; they have now modified 
the report to one thousand; at this ratio of reduction by next year it 
will be ten cents. 
Now compare these plain statements with the insinuations of this 
New Hampshire doctor’s letter. 
The same kind of spirit has been shown here to some extent. 
Only yesterday a statement was made here that of some fifty or more 
names for the remonstrants purporting to come from Salem, only 
three could be found in the Salem directory. As you yourselves will 
see by due investigation, these names did not purport to be from 
Salem. No place is affixed to these names. A forced construction 
was placed on the fact that the gentleman who placed these names 
on the table wrote something like this on the paper connected with 
their names: “ Mr. So and-So, from Salem, sends in so many names,” 
the explanation of which is this : the gentleman who collected the 
names has an office in Salem, whence he sent this list; but helms 
business in other towns taking him daily from Salem, and he col- 
lected other names in the localities visited, presenting them all, at 
last, as the names of citizens of Massachusetts, without giving the 
place of residence, thinking it unnecessary lo mention the towns 
visited, since this matter is not a town hut a State affair. This sim- 
ply shows to what extremes persons engaged in the engineering of 
this hoped for monopoly will go. 
The object of tire petitioners for the passage of this proposed Bill is 
to make the number of physicians in the State small, and thereby 
constitute the greatest money monopoly ever heard of in this coun- 
try, or any other. Then every member of the profession in this State 
will have security of practice, whether he helps or hinders the sick, 
and they will not only have plenty to do, but can charge whatever 
price they please for their services, and there is no appeal; for there 
is no other doctor permitted to practice, without pains and penalties. 
The real purpose and intent of the Bill is hidden under two very 
popular disguises. First, that of a higher standard of education, 
and secondly, the extermination of “ quackery." We will notice 
these points in their respective order: 
First, is this Bill in the interests of higher education? We have- 
already shown that it will hinder progress in medical knowledge. 
Let us see what the Bill actually does by its licenses and prohibi- 
tions. In the very start It gives all the members of the various State 
societies a license to practice without an examination. And yet 
many of the members of these various State societies, it is well 
known, have never received a diploma from any medical college, and 
many others who have a diploma in said societies took it from some 
one of the very colleges this Board of Examiners will condemn. 
Much has been said condemnatory of the ignorance of many doc- 
tors who are outside the pale of these State societies. I will offset 
that by stating something concerning the ignorance of those inside 
the pale : A druggist asked a gentleman the other day what he would 
make of the following: “Ag Moni.” The gentleman, although a 
learned physician, did not know, neither did the druggist. Another IN THE HEALING AET. 
57 
member of the Massachusetts State Medical Society was asked to 
state what a common dose of morphine is. He replied from one to five 
grains. In one of your highly approved medical colleges of this State 
the old Caloric theory of heat was taught five years ago, and is to-day 
for aught I know. 1 should hope that learned (?) professor would not 
be on the Board of Examiners provided in this bill; for in that case 
no true and accepted scientist could get a license, simply because he 
would answer correctly, and the Professor would not know it. 
Much has been said about the manifest ignorance of “quacks” 
who sign certificates of death. Did they give us anything that could 
excel the following from a regular M. D.? “ Not certain of the cause 
of death. Don’t know whether it was scarlet fever or from eating 
too much Bellona sausage.” 
They tell you this bill is for the purpose of weeding out pretend- 
ers; but they do not tell us how it is to work this most desirable 
change. They raise a great cry about “ quacks.” A “quack’’sim- 
ply means one who pretends to do something he cannot do. That 
there are such pretenders in the medical profession, and in every 
other profession, nobody thinks of denying; and far be it from me, 
or any opposerof this Bill, to defend such. The people all have a 
comnioamterest in rooting out all such, and many persons have signed 
the.petition for the passage of this Bill because it was represented to 
them that this would exterminate that obnoxious race; but has any 
one shown us how this Bill, it passed, has any power to sift them 
out? It has no such power, but, on the contrary, it protects them. 
It is a wall of fire around all the “ quacks ” who are inside the medi- 
cal societies, and where is the man who possesses the audacity to 
say there are no “quacks ” inside those societies? Yet this Bill will 
compel the people to employ them, because no choice is left them; 
for the number from which to choose, should such a Bill as tins pass, 
would be kept exceedingly small. Note another means which this 
Bill provides for keeping the number small: 
By the terms of this Bill no one is eligible to an examination mere- 
ly because he is sufficiently learned, or has graduated, unless he 
shall have graduated from a college which they approve. Thus their 
power Is wholly arbitrary. They can cut down the number of candi- 
dates, at any time, by disapproving the colleges from which they 
graduated, though every such college holds a charter from the State 
In which it exists. Again, another means Is provided for lessening 
the number of physicians, in the clause about “ a good moral charac- 
ter.” The Bill provides that any person having a good moral char- 
acter shall he licensed, if such person has practiced within the State 
ten consecutive years, yet, although this looks very fair on the face 
of it, by looking a little deeper we shall see that no criterion of 
morals is established, but the matter is left wholly to this Board of 
Examiners. How easy and how consistent it is with the entire spirit 
of this Bill to say, “ If you have practiced ten years without being a 
member of our "Society or having studied medicine in the regular 
way, you are a ‘ quack,’ and you have been humbugging the people 
ten years, and no license shall be granted to a man who is immoral 
enough to humbug the people for that period.” For if this Bill 
means anything it means to teach that all persons who have not been 
through a medical college are humbugs unless they belong to one of 
the State medical societies. Thus all such can be cut off. 
They tell you of criminal practices among “ quacks ” that this Bill 
will put a stop to. Gentlemen, I hold in my hand the names of four 
physicians now residing in this city, who are members of the old 
Massachusetts State Medical Society, in good and regular standing, 
who have been before the court for the crime of producing abortion, 
and also the name of one who is now serving his time in the State 
Prison for arson; so that it seems that the Massachusetts State 
Medical Society is not in a condition to “cast the first stone”; but 
still it asks that you throw around them, by special legislation, the 
arm of the law, lest people shall employ better men outside the regu- 
lar societies. 
Again, this Bill takes away, witliout compensation, an honorable 58 
CIVIL AND MEDICAL LIBEETY 
and successful business from a large number of persons, which is 
most unjust and cruel. And what does this law propose to call a 
crime? Simply this ; the restoring to life and health a human being. 
This Bill docs not ask the question, “ Does this man cure the sick ?” 
No ; if he cures him twice, it makes him pay one thousand dollars ; 
if he cures a patient three times, it imprisons him. Surely such a 
law is nothing better than barbarous. 
Again, I object to the Bill because it practically puts into the hands 
of one medical society arbitrary power; and that society so hostile 
to the other societies that, according to the testimony of the presi- 
dent of that societv, they will not counsel with a Homeopath or an 
Eclectic, though the patient calling for counsel is dying and this 
counsel will save his life. This rests not alone upon the testimony 
of this president; it is one of the rules of the by-laws of said so- 
ciety. This Bill would force the two small State’societies into the 
very jaws of this inhuman lion; although one quarter part of the 
members of one of these societies have sent intbeir written or verbal 
remonstrance; and a large and influential part of this other society 
also join in the remonstrance, led by no less a member than its worthy 
secretary. Dr. Morse, of Salem, a man of high social standing and 
extensive practice. Other eminent Homeopathic physicians of this 
city, members of the State society, and Professors in the Medical 
College, sent up their names, but you have not had time to hear them. 
Again, I object to this Bill because it proposes to legislate away 
the sacred rights and dearest privileges of the people. What is so 
sacred to a man as his own life? Yet this Bill proposes he shall not 
be allowed to choose the means of his own recovery if he is ill. 
Let us notice the ground upon which the petitioners ask for the 
passage of such a bill: 
Ist, They claim that the medical profession needs protection from 
the competition of “ quacks,” and to this end they brought a Bishop 
from, I do not know where, neither do I know what he was Bishop 
of—l only know the lawyer foi the petitioners was very careful to 
make you understand he was a Bishop. This Bishop said the medi- 
cal profession was a very honorable one and needed protection; he 
said also that the clergy needed protection just the same as the doc- 
tors, because there were so many “ quack ” preachers. Now what is 
the burden of this argument? If it means anything it means, “We 
hope you will pass a bill to protect the doctors this year, and then a 
bill next year cutting olf all ministers from preaching who are not in 
this ” (or in some other bishop’s) “ diocese.” I admire the candor of 
that Bishop, and I feel greatly obliged to him for helping our side so 
much. If we had said there is no difference between the doctors 
asking for a bill to protect them, and that of ministers asking one to 
protect the clergy, the advocates of this Bill would have said there 
was a difference; but now that it comes from one of their own choos- 
ing-one they had brought here because he was a Bishop, thinking 
thereby, as they have in several other instances, to overawe us—it 
strikes them dumb that this good, simple-hearted Bishop, should, all 
unintentionally, “ let the cat out of the bag,” by saying, in substance: 
“ Please pass this Bill for the doctors, and then pass one for us min- 
isters, so that we can get larger salaries, for we need more money as 
much as the doctors do.” 
They have brought you the names of other prominent clergymen. 
What we would like to know Is, whether these clergymen who sent 
in their names for this petition know what they are doing, and are, 
hence, using this as an entering wedge to bring back the oppression 
of the ages gone by, or whether they do not see the bearing of this 
Bill. lam happy to say I incline to the latter opinion; for I know a 
number who signed this petition who are now sorry, saying they 
would never have signed it had they known its full meaning. All they 
meant by signing it was to get rid of pretenders, but they now see 
the Bill is not calculated in the least to do that, but is simply asking 
for the most crushing monopoly that ever bore down upon the com- 
mon people. All this cry for the medical societies, all this telling 
how the poor members of the medical societies have fiat pocket- IN TIIE HEALING AET. 
59 
books because the people will persist in employing other physicians, 
is contemptible. Boor, poor regulars! how hungry they go because 
the people arc not compelled to take their calomel, and prefer the 
harmless root and-herb doctor! Why, all this lamentation in behalf 
of the doctors, because they may not compel the people to employ 
them, makes me think of the little boy whose mother was showing 
him a picture of Daniel in the lions’den; the little fellow began to 
cry bitterly, when the mother said: “ You pity poor Daniel, don’t 
you, because the lions are going to eat him up?” His reply, amid 
his sobs, was, “ I was not thinking anything about Daniel. I was 
thinking about that poor little lion in the corner, who won’t get any, 
’cause the old lions will eat him all up first.” 
In all this cry for a Bill to protect the members of the old medical 
societies, not a word is said for the common people, whom Daniel 
represents in the lions’ den. This Bill takes away all possible com- 
petition, which is the only safeguard of the people. 
No price for medical advice or treatment is mentioned in this Bill. 
All is left to the nine despots of the proposed Board of Examiners, 
clothed with absolute power, and these despots are the interested 
party. They may say, if the price is too high, people need not em- 
ploy the doctor. But what kind of an apology is that? People can- 
not help being sick, and they cannot lie and die, as these monopo- 
lists very well know; hence those members of the medical societies, 
who have no practice now, and who, for want of natural fitness, 
ought never to have any, the people will be compelled to employ. 
Why, gentlemen, when 1 think of the inhumanity of this Bill, and, 
practically, those who advocate it, I am dumb with horror. The 
grocers might as well band themselves together and ask for legal 
monopoly. The friends of this Bill tell you there is an Immense 
amount of malpractice among the outside doctors, yet they have 
failed to point out a single case. Go look at the law reports, and 
you will find scarcely a case of malpractice outside the members of 
these societies, while the reports of those inside are innumerable. 
They talk to us as though we had no law now to regulate the prac- 
tice of medicine, when the truth is we have laws that cover every 
imaginable case of w'rong doing, in this matter, that law can cover. 
We have already, for instance, a law that if a man advertises him- 
self as M. D., when he has not that title, he can at once be arrest- 
ed for obtaining monev under false pretences, and the penalty is 
State Prison. Again, we have the strictest laws concerning mal- 
practice, making bad or injurious medical practice also a State 
Prison offence. Now I ask in all candor what more we need? No 
further legislation is possible without abridging the rights of the 
people by taking from them power to choose for one’s self what 
physician he shall have. 
Please notice this is a contest not between “ quacks ” on the one 
hand and educated, honest physicians on the other, but, simply, may 
the people elect the person they wish to treat them when sick, or 
may they not? 
No testimony whatever has been brought, during this protracted 
hearing, against the practice of those who work outside the regular 
schools. Mark one thing in all the testimony presented: not a 
physician among the “ irregulars ” has testified ; they have all mod- 
estly stayed in the background, while their works have praised them. 
The witnesses are persons in every walk of life except the doctors. 
Every one who has testified has stated that he was first given up to 
die by the regular physicians before he employed one of the outside 
physicians. The Regulars have no reason to complain, for all these 
persons gave them the first chance, and in many instances were doc- 
tored by them until they had no money left to pay the outside doc- 
tor who finally cured them. Does not this crowd of witnesses show 
plainly that if you will legislate some way, it certainly should not 
be against those who have wrought the cures? 
The President of the old Massachusetts State Medical Society de- 
clared to you that cancer could not he cured. Thus, through the 
mouth of their chief, the regular physicians declare they cannot cure 60 
CIVIL AND MEDICAL LIBERTY 
cancer ; yet I have brought witness after witness to testify that they 
have been cured of cancer by these irregular physicians, whom this 
Bill would cut oil from practice. One might say these were another 
kind of tumor, and not cancer; but we have been careful to guard 
that point by proving, in every case, that the regular physicians pro- 
nounced it a cancer, and incurable. The President, above referred 
to, said it was a blood disease, and hence incurable. The cases we 
have presented here have been well ever since ihe cancers were 
taken out, and they were taken out years ago. They testified that 
the doctors, who cured the cancers, gave them medicine for the blood 
at the same time. Thus we have proved thatthesecancer curers take 
the cancer out without t lie use of the knife, and that their knowledge 
of blood-remedies enables them to eliminate all tendency to cancer 
from the blood. Can the people afford to be deprived of doctors who 
are known to cure cancers in innumerable cases, and be compelled 
to content themselves with a class of physicians who come in here 
and testify to you that 1 hey cannot cure a cancer? Cancer is a dis- 
ease more dreaded than any other, and yet a very common disease. 
Think of the despair of (he poor patient, when he is told by one of 
the doctors whom this Bill would protect and give the monopoly to, 
“ You have a cancer, and I am powerless to help you. You must be 
eaten up slowly by this most loathsome disease while yet alive.” 
Imagine this Bill taking effect as a law, and though the dying patient 
begs of the old cancer-curer for help, he dare not, for the prison 
walls loom up before his sight. 
Who has favored this Bill beside the lawyers, who were hired to do 
so, and a few physicians ? Did the honored President of the Boston 
University? To be sure he was brought before you to advocate that 
side. Did he do so? No! He warned you against putting so much 
power into the hands of one class. Not once did he favor this Bill by 
a single expression. His arguments were all on the other side ; tell- 
ing you of the tyranny concerning this medical matter in the despotic 
States of Europe. Did he ask you to follow the example of those old 
oppressive governments! No! Did the President of the Young 
Men’s Christian Union favor this Bill? He did not say one word 
about the Bill. 
The advocates of this Bill tell you thepeop’e need the guardianship 
of the Medical Society, because the people do not know what they 
want. This has ever been the voice of despotism. I wi'l not go 
over the testimony in detail; I will content myself by mentioning a 
single case, which you recognize to be a fair representative of the 
testimony which has come before you, throughout this enti, t 
hearing: 
Mr. Nye of Augusta, Me., sent to this honorable Coinmittes a let- 
ter, asking you not to recommend any legislation in favor of any such 
law as this Bill proposes, in which he gives a statement of his own 
case and others. Permit me to tell you who this man is. He is Su- 
perintendent of an Orthodox Sunday school. He has been Treasurer 
of the Maine Central Railroad for seventeen years, and for many 
years State Commlssionerof Insurance; also Centennial Commissioner 
from Maine ; a man of the highest standing. This gentleman testifies 
that he was taken ill while on \ visit to West Point, some ten years 
since, with sciatica. The eminent surgeon of the place attended 
him, but gave him no relief ; finally told him he could not hope to be 
better for one year, at least. He then came home and employed 
the most eminent of the Maine doctors, but with no success. Finally, 
a magnetic healer, (a resident of Boston.) cured him with one treat- 
ment. Mr. Nye also speaks of the case of his wife, who had a can- 
cer. The best doctors of Boston, the most eminent in the regular 
faculty, were consulted. Finally they decided that within ten days 
the knife would be her only chance of prolonging life. A clairvoyant 
said, “ Do not use the knife.” A magnetic healer was then employed, 
and the wife was cured. This was ten years ago, and the wife has 
been well up to date. These, gentlemen, are not isolated cases, but 
of every-day and hour occurrence, in every part of the State. 
Gentlemen, although I do not, like my brother Giles here, believe IN' THE HEALING AET. 
spirits of the departed produce these cures, yet we all must believe 
that some great physiological law is here Involved, the discovery of 
which is of the highest value to mankind ; and I ask you, in the 
name of God and humanity, not to recommend a bill that shall cut off 
these benefactors from practicing within this Commonwealth. 
You must have noticed the great crowd that has attended this hear- 
ing from the first. You also have not failed to notice, by their demon- 
strations, that they are utterly opposed to this Bill, and most of them 
eager to testify what great good has been done them by the persons 
whom tills Bill will cut off. A mother became so anxious that, al- 
though the time was filled, yet she cried out 1o you from the depths 
of her grief and fear, in the name of God, not to pass this Bill, for 
her life and that of her friends had been saved by these persons of 
natural medical genius. 
I but voice the prayer of the vast majority of the citizens of this 
Commonwealth when I pray you not to deprive us of the help of 
those persons who have again and again proved themselves possessed 
of the natural and improved gifts which make them the physicians! 
Will you take away the persons who have been our family physicians 
for years, in whom we have the utmost confidence, who have saved 
us and our little ones when all scholastic skill gave us up to die, and 
in their places compel us to take the young man just passed from the 
hand of this board of censors, with no other claim upon our confidence 
than the fact that he has a good memory or is the son of a rich father 
who would have him a professional man, because it gives him higher 
caste in society, when, according to the laws of his organization, he 
should have been a coal heaver, or at best a shoemaker? 
The subject before us is of the gravest character. It is a matter of 
Individual choice in a case of life and death. In the simplest words 
possible, we pray yon not to take away from us, the common people, 
the one we choose to stand by us in the hour of our sorest need. Do 
not take away from us—who believe that Dr. Morse, of Salem, who 
was for years a professor in the medical department of the Boston 
University, spoke the truth when he said that some men were born 
physicians, and such were always successful practitioners, even if 
uneducated, while he knew many who, though having graduated 
from the oldest medical college in Massachusetts, were never known 
to help a patient—the power to choose these natural physicians, to 
whose wonderful cures so many testify. 
The natural physicians will not go to yonr approved medical col- 
lege ; they have methods of study peculiar to themselves. Think of 
the “Sweet family of natural bone setters ” being compelled to go 
through a medical college in their time, when in after years every 
medical college was obliged to learn of them, or the college go un- 
patronized. They say: “ These men may go to college if they have 
this natural genius.” That is easily enough said, hut will they tell 
me when in the history of the world David would wear Saul’s armor 
when he went out to tight the giant? They will simply give up prac- 
tice if you pass this law, and we shall be deprived of their most valu- 
able services. Ido not plead for them. They do not need us; we 
.■need them ! The man of genius always stands on the dignity of 
his God-given powers, and says to the world, what Edmund Burke 
said when he was finally shut out of Parliament; “Gentlemen, I can 
afford to get along without you, if you can without me.” It is the 
fifth-rate men who go down on their knees, crawling in the dust to get 
place and power, as is amply illustrated in the little fifth-rate doc- 
tors who ask for this monopoly for their benefit. Not one of the doc- 
tors the Old School calls “ quacks ” has appeared here asking you 
not to pass this Bill. They can afford to stand back, as they have 
stood. But wg, who wish their help, cannot afford to stand back and 
see our rights taken from us, not only the right to liberty and the 
pursuit of happiness, but the right to life; unless we can live in spite 
of all the poison that the old Allopath would pour down our throats, 
and charge us what he pleases for. 
The people do not want this Bill, therefore I pray you will not 
recommend it!