It is often profitable to pull ones self out of ones own bailiwick and to betake oneself unto more enlightened lands and learn how the more enlightened members of the profession wrestled with the problems that bedevil all of us. So the writer himself to Chicago last fall and learned how the master minds of the medical profession (non-homoeopathic) handle the parturient female and believe me, brother and sister homoeopaths, it was a revelation.
The whole thing is a masterpiece of organization, complex in its nature and most Nazified in its operation.
Having a baby outside of a hospital is a crime in Chicago far worse than gambling, bootlegging and other forms of sin. It matters not whether the mother and child do well; they have violated all of the laws of infection and the last techniques of the august authorities who know just how it should be done.
Now the pinnacle of this hierarchy is no less than the Board of Health, usually, in most communities, the lowest level of medical politics. It is the Board of Health which determines where and how the new citizen shall arrive. The poor devil who has just a degree and no diploma from the Board of Obstetrics dare not do a thing. All he can do is to suspect pregnancy and send the woman to a specialist who will determine if she is pregnant and will steer her to the proper hospital and there she will come under a chain of command from the Health Board clear down to the man who shovels the snow off the walk.
Now this diplomat of the Board of Obstetrics will do the preliminary work when labor begins but if the intern or the scrub woman think he is not doing so well and following the iron- clad rules of the hierarchy, he must call in consultation which may go to the pinnacle and even to God, for all I know. Woe be unto him if he was lax in this, for he will lose his shirt, his pants and his professional reputation. He might as well go out and look for common labor. This actually happened to one poor devil.
Now there are three very important lessons to be learned from this:.
1. The advertising put out by the A.M.A. says, “let yourself be treated only by a qualified physician.” Most medical licenses state that a physician who has become licensed is qualified to practice medicine, surgery and obstetrics. The A.M.A. also claims that only graduates of their schools are so qualified.
2. A member of the Board of Obstetrics is not qualified to practice obstetrics according to the facts stated above.
3. The medical profession has sold itself for pot of MESS (age) rather than a mess of potage to a political proposition that bellies individual effort and the sturdy and rugged individualism the A.M.A. brags about so much in its fight against socialized medicine. This is the most vicious type of state medicine.
The patients Dilemma: who the hell, then, is qualified?.
TOLEDO, OHIO.
