Even incurables homoeopathy carries to ripe and effective life spans. And homoeopathy in and of itself is a philosophy important for everyone to understand who can. In short, as a unique and vital humanitarian service, homoeopathy has every qualification except a voice.
All of this could probably be said with about equal force at almost any time in homoeopathic history. But just now, after a century and a third of applying successfully for mankinds benefit laws that are clear and do not change, homoeopathy faces persecution of free science in some other countries, and in the United States the beginnings of socialized medicine. Whether a socialized or government system of medicine will harm homoeopathy may appear more clearly in the future, but for the present there is no expectation that it will do good.
But aside from that, the chances are that if the sort of people who have the capacity understood homoeopathy as it is, much of the very ground would be dissolved from under any demand for socialization. It is not homoeopathy that is growing more involved and more expensive as the years roll on. It is not homoeopathy that wishes to regiment all people under an authoritarian system. Homoeopathy is not the practice of treating in the mass. It deals with each and every individual, as a separate human being, and as a separate whole. Homoeopathy indeed has all the qualifications, but no voice. Is there a job to be done?.
THE DOCTOR-LAYMAN RELATIONSHIP.
Some years ago in the Middle West lived a venerable physician who in his youth had sat at the feet of Dr. Constantine Hering and who therefore undoubtedly understood homoeopathic prescribing. With that start he was as a matter of course engaged in the general practice of medicine. Once a young farm lad came to him with a highly inflamed appendix, expecting to be sent to a hospital for operation. To his surprise he got medicine instead and did not have to be operated. That brought another case, and that another.
Patients who had been saved from the appendix operation gradually filtered into the neighboring population, and did not suffer returns of appendicitis, and seemed to get along very well in other respects. Word got around that the venerable physician and his homoeopathy were great for appendicitis. Like Joseph Jefferson, whose public would let him play nothing but Rip Van Winkle, the white-haired homoeopathist got very little else to do in his old age but rescue inflamed appendices from the knife.
Unless every physician be a born teacher, and devote office time by the hour to lay instruction, the ordinary doctor-patient relationship cannot do homoeopathy justice. But unlike earlier days, when medicine was one of only three learned professions, two circumstances seem to conspire now in favor of a more rational and better designed publicity. Homoeopathy in the first place is a set of rational principles. The principles are within the grasp of a reasoning lay mind.
With guidance and illustration, the reasoning lay mind can understand and appreciate homoeopathys clear laws, enjoy them, and recognize whether a doctor has or has not qualified himself to apply them. In the second place, though the proportion of inquisitive independent thinkers is still minute, there are today numberless callings within range of medicine in their intellectual requirements, where in years gone by there were only the clerical and legal. Medicine today has a better prepared, more selective, larger potential audience than ever before.
LET THE LAYMEN SERVE.
In The Principles of Scientific Management, published twenty- seven years ago, the first sentence of Paragraph one reads: “The Principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee.” That statement of creed came at the height of Americans industrial speed, in the midst of an economy built on the former creed, that the first responsibility of management was a good report for the investors.
Frederick W. Taylor went far enough in this opening sentence to draw attention away from the thought of profit only to the accompanying thought of worker welfare. As he proceeded with his thesis, he developed an interesting corollary, that employer and employee both prosper best when they join forces for the highest service to their customers.
A few years later in Chicago a club started that was to have one representative from each of the separate professions and lines of business, called for that reason “Rotary”. This club made bold to say, for its rallying theme, “He profits most who serves best,” and on that slogan went on to spread all over the world.
About a month ago, George G. Colbean of Chicago, President of the National Paper Trade Association of the United States, Inc., sent a circular letter to member companies calling a meeting to consider principally, among other things, “what could be done by them cooperatively as private industry to take up the slack of unemployment”. President of a trade association, formed originally for mutual protection against economic inroads, among which was labor seeking higher pay, he called up for consideration the trades responsibility toward its workers. But as he developed his thesis he went much farther:.
I believe that trade and industry still have adequate power and resources not only to meet these conditions (meanings those imposed by the Government) but to reform our whole society and place it on a more prosperous economic level than it ever enjoyed before, if we recognize that economic security is our job and that it is not just a debatable political or sociological issue.
Gathered here in Washington last September was the Seventh International Management Congress. On September 20th, Lewis H. Brown, President of Johns-Manville Corporation, closed his address with a seven-point creed for management. Here are four of the seven:.
That we should constantly seek to provide better values at lower costs so that more of our people can enjoy more of the worlds goods.
That we should stimulate the genius of science and utilize methods of research to improve old products and create new ones so as to continuously provide new fields of employment for the present and coming generations.
That management should encourage fair trade practices in business which, whether effected by competition or cooperation, will be so shaped as to be for the best interest of our customers and of society as a whole.
That it is managements duty to be alert to its own shortcomings, to the need for improvement, and to new requirements of society, while always recognizing the responsibility of its trusteeship.
Says another great head of a great industry: “A basic article of our business creed is that no sale is economically constructive unless it profits the buyer as much as or more than the seller”.
Nine years of business depression are beginning to bend business thinking. Business, for its own good, begins to reckon with its own social obligations. The good of society as a whole begins to take preference in sound business calculation over mere financial trusteeship. As a means toward a higher level of prosperity than any already reached, business and industry turn altruistic, write into their articles of faith, “He profits most who serves best.” There is new point in the old fact that industry and business never could have made out without their public. It is their public that they are working for.
With just such an alignment medicine is in exact parallel. Medicines public is the community of laymen. Laymen need physicians, often urgently, sometimes desperately, but still comparatively. Physicians need of laymen is absolute.
