Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 June 1885 — MEDICAL ETHICS. [ARTICLE]

MEDICAL ETHICS.

Doctors Object to Pay for Advertising, but Are Always Ready for Free Puffs. A Chicago medical society recently amputated a member. It was a very good member they cut off, and wad not diseased at all. In fact, the member that was cut off was the only sound, healthy member that the medical society could boast of. But, dropping all nonsense, a medical association expelled one of its members. They expelled him, not because he had prescribed arsenic instead pf quinine, or because he had committed some pf his. homicides while in an intoxicated condition. Nobody ever heard of a medical society amputating a member for any such triviality as that. i Now for what does the reader suppose those sawbones cut off the offending member? For nothing ih the world except that he had put his business card in a newspaper and paid for it. It is contrary to medical ethics for a Chicago doctor to advertise in a newspaper, Why there should be any more objection to a doctor putting his card in a newspaper than there is in tacking his professional shingle on his office door, is more than we can comprehend without some operation having been previously performed on our jounialistic brain. We utterly fail to discover why it is more unprofessional in a doctor to advertise in a newspaper than it is for a lawyer or a banker to do so. This is a peculiarly singular feature of medical ethics, when it is taken into consideration that otherwise there is no profession fonder of newspaper notoriety. If a son of zEsculapius does some fine work in repairing a rickety liver, or putting in order some other part of the human anatomy that has become unhinged, we have never perceived any wild, frenzied opposition on the part of the doctor to having the fact mentioned in flattering terms in the local paper. There is nothing in that that interferes with the therapeutic, chirurgical, sanitary, analeptic, prophylactic, or any other kind' of medical ethics. Again, it will be remembered that every once in a while the doctors hold a kind of ecumenical council. We have never observed any attempt to prevent the press from publishing the sickening details. Usually ,one of the doctors is delivered of a long, salutiferous, balsamic kind of a pastoral address, full of Latin names and less intelligible English, about materia medica, or dietetics, of pharmacology, after which his one object in life seems to be to inflict it, as a kind of mental porous plaster, on the reading public, through the medium of • the local press. There seems to be nothing in medical ethics against running an entire issue of a newspaper with that kind of a free cyclopean advertisement of personal and professional egotism; ye t t when any other doctor puts in* a two-inch ad, that he is authorized by law to take human life, the entire medical profession sits up on its hinds legs and howls about ethics, which goes to show that the medical profession 4s as badly afflicted with humbuggery as is theology.— Texas Siftings.