I do not believe myself that an individual should necessarily have a lot of medical training in order to understand the simple matter in connection with the circulation of the blood through an injured part of the human frame. I will just give on illustration. I was playing a game of lawn tennis at Cannes with Lord Lovat, and I sprained my ankle. I had sprained it three times before, and was treated by the medical profession.
On each occasion it took about six weeks before my ankle was restored to full strength. I asked at Cannes whether there was a Swedish masseur. I was told that there was. I went to him and within a week he had cured by ankle by manipulation. He had been trained in the Stockholm School and was a properly certificated masseur who had received his training there.
He told me that on one occasion an Austrian came to him when he was a medical student at Stockholm. As this man was getting out of the train he had sprained his ankle and he had come in order to compete in the world championship in long-distance skating. The accident occurred on the Sunday morning, and this man and another osteopath treated him for the best part of twenty-four hours. That man won the long-distance skating championship of the world, thanks to the way in which these medical students — medical because they had only learned osteopathy– had treated this particular ankle.
The man showed me a pearl ring which he had received as a reward for the way in which he had enabled the man to compete in this competition. I could give many other cases. It does seem to me that osteopathy has a good work to do in this country without interfering with medical practitioners at all, and that there is a very good case for the Bill being read a second time.
LORD ERNLE: My Lords, I should like to support the Motion in favour of this Bill being read the second time. We have all listened to a most impressive speech from Lord Moynihan, coming as it does from a man who is not only a most distinguished surgeon but is at the moment the spokesman of the profession of doctors. I felt when he sat down that I could hardly venture to put before him my own point of view, but I would remind him that though as a mere layman I cannot argue with him on scientific questions, yet, however easy and however great the victory that science may win in argument, it would find the great mass of laymen in this country entrenched behind what they think impregnable lines –that is to say, the lines of their own experience in their own cases or in those of their friends.
If I might illustrate my meaning and suggest to him a test of what I mean, let him go down to Melton or any resort of the men and women who follow hounds. Let him summon a meeting of these hunting people and put before them his proposition that osteopathy ought never to be practised in this country except under the advice, direction and supervision of a doctor or a surgeon.
I am convinced that he would be overwhelmingly defeated on the vote. And why? It is, after all, only the opinion of ignorant laymen. Granted, but the vote is given from the experience of these men and women who know what benefits they have received from osteopathy, which they have failed in like measure, or with the same rapidity, to obtain from either doctor or surgeon.
I am quite aware that in some respects the principles of osteopathy are fundamentally different from those of medical practice. Their theory, for instance, of the human laboratory and of the natural medicines which it supplies is quite contrary to the almost indiscriminate administration of drugs which is followed in ordinary medicine. So also is their method of approach, which is a new and independent angle, and if that be so –and I think Lord Moynihan said they were fundamentally opposed to British medicine –is not desirable that these avenues should be explored to the utmost limit, that these latent possibilities should be fully developed both as a matter of public policy and in the public interest? At the present moment their development is completely stopped, and it is stopped, if the noble Lord will forgive me for saying so, by the attitude of the General Medical Council. Quite rightly, he would say; but the point is that they are stopped.
What I want to see is that they should be liberated to develop to the full their own theories of the medical art, and that they should for that purpose be enabled, which they are not now, to guard themselves against the unqualified and unregistered practitioners who exploit the credulity of the public. We must remember that at the present moment any qualified medical practitioner who associates himself with an osteopath in a case is under the ban; he does so at his peril; he may be struck off the register. The Royal College of Physicians, therefore, stamps the osteopath as a quack or a charlatan almost indiscriminately, and they have no means of helping themselves.
THE EARL OF KINNOULL: My Lords, knowing the very conservative character of the British Medical Association, I was not in the least surprised to see a Motion for the rejection of this Bill standing in the name of my noble friend Lord Moynihan, but having heard the speech of my noble Lord, Lord Dawson of Penn, I am rather at a loss to know what their real objections to this Bill are. My noble friend Lord Moynihan has talked about the “irreparable calamity” which would happen in this country if your Lordships give this Bill a Second Reading this afternoon.
One of the main points made by my noble friend Lord Moynihan was the protection of the public, but as I read this Bill the whole point of it is to protect the public against people calling themselves osteopaths who really have no knowledge at all of osteopathy. I know the case of a gentleman very much like that, whom I came across some years ago, and who was by trade, I believe, a steeplejack or something of that description.
He made quite a good living out of osteopathy, bonesetting, and massage generally. I do not say that he was bad — I do not know about that –but he had had no previous training in it at all. The whole object of this Bill is to make it compulsory for people who practise osteopathy to have some training such as the noble Lord, Lord Dawson of Penn, was talking about a few moments ago.
I was exceedingly interested in the remainder of the speech of my noble friend Lord Moynihan–it was an extremely interesting survey of medical history– but I really could not see the relevance of it; and that applies also to a certain extent to the speech of my noble friend Lord Dawson of Penn.
He went into very interesting facts of medical history: and as so much has been said about medical history, I should like, with great respect, to remind my noble friends in the medical profession that it was not such a very long time ago when doctors believed that the only way of curing anything was by blood-letting or by the administration of crushed oyster shells, or by taking moss from around the skull of a dead man and all that king of thing. The medical profession have always systematically gone against anything which has been the slightest bit in advance of the ordinary.
There is no good reason as far as I can see for the opposition to this Bill, because both noble Lords have this afternoon praised osteopathy, both of them admitted quite freely that there was a tremendous amount in osteopathy, and the noble Lord, Lord Dawson of Penn, said that he himself would not hesitate to call in an osteopath if he were satisfied that it were necessary. Yet, in spite of that, they say that it would be “an irreparable calamity” if this Bill obtained a Second Reading!.
LORD AMPTHILL: My Lords. I had no intention whatever of speaking when I came here, but after hearing the two noble Lords who are so eminent in the medical profession, I feel I must really say a word or two in support of this Bill for a personal reason.
In the first place, I owe very much to osteopaths, and so do my family and many of my friends. Whatever the General Medical Council may do, osteopathy is here and has come to stay, and the time is not far distant when every sensible medical practitioner will send his patients to an osteopath, if his is the appropriate treatment. Indeed, I was glad to hear Lord Dawson say, if I understood him rightly, that he himself had done that. My two noble friends, if they will forgive me for saying so, spoke entirely beside the point.
Very little that they said had anything whatever to do with the Bill, and the noble Lord who moved the rejection used language of exaggeration such as I have never heard in this House before, language entirely inappropriate to a case of this kind. Just fancy talking about an irreparable calamity if this Bill were given a Second Reading. We have registered midwives and dentists and nurses, and no irreparable calamity has resulted. If you register osteopaths, it is not going to do the slightest harm to the medical profession, or affect them in any way whatever.
