In the February number of the Journal of the A.I.H. appears an article by an esteemed former editor of the Homoeopathic Recorder, Dr. Rudolph F. Rabe. This article is entitled Homoeopathy and the War. Evidently Dr. Rabe is a confirmed optimist.
We have no fault to find with the proposition “to make of homoeopathy a therapeutic specialty, which in fact it is, and to employ this specialty in the same manner that other forms of special therapy are resorted to … Then, perhaps, training in this specialty will be followed by its employment on a wide scale within our military forces”.
This war is the biggest business enterprise the world has ever seen and dont let any politician sell you the vote-getting idea that profits have been taken out of war as far as the U.S.A. or any other country is concerned. The profits are still there and on a vaster scale than ever before. The larger our armed forces the more uniforms, the more munitions,the more chemotherapeutic agents, the more shots in the arms will the profiteers be able to sell to the Government. Pearl Harbor is a happy day for many business interest to remember.
Homoeopathic methods are to attractive from a commercial standpoint. The True Art of Healing does not readily lend itself to exploitation. It has no appeal for the greedy nor for those who envision a Utopia of politically controlled medical and surgical practice.
Everything sold for the armed forces has to be approved by the gods of this world and then put on a routine basis. As far as the military medical man is concerned he might just as well have left his brains at home in a glass jar for his family to admire. It requires no more intelligence to give poor devil a shot in the arm then it does to light a cigarette. Everything is being reduced to an automatic reflex business.
Specialty or no specialty or no specialty or anything else, there is not the slightest chance that homoeopathy will be employed “on a wide scale within our military forces.” Whatever employment of such methods any individual physicians may undertake will be solely on their own initiative and definitely on an illicit or bootleg basis.
Allan D. Sutherland was born in Northfield, Vermont in 1897, delivered by the local homeopathic physician. The son of a Canadian Episcopalian minister, his father had arrived there to lead the local parish five years earlier and met his mother, who was the daughter of the president of the University of Norwich. Four years after Allan’s birth, ministerial work lead the family first to North Carolina and then to Connecticut a few years afterward.
Starting in 1920, Sutherland began his premedical studies and a year later, he began his medical education at Hahnemann Medical School in Philadelphia.
Sutherland graduated in 1925 and went on to intern at both Children’s Homeopathic Hospital and St. Luke’s Homeopathic Hospital. He then was appointed the chief resident at Children’s. With the conclusion of his residency and 2 years of clinical experience under his belt, Sutherland opened his own practice in Philadelphia while retaining a position at Children’s in the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department.
In 1928, Sutherland decided to set up practice in Brattleboro.