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NATIONAL SECL’LAT.COCZnT
N)63O
HOSPITALS & DISPENSARIES
NOT OF
CHRISTIAN ORIGIN.
8T
J.
S Y M E S.
LONDON:
FREETHOUGHT PUBLISHING COMPANY.
28, Stonecutter Street, E.C.
PRICE ONE
PENNY.
�LONDON:
PRINTED BY ANNIE BESANT AND CHARLES BRADLAUGH,
28, stonecutter street, e.c.
�HOSPITALS AND DISPENSARIES
NOT OF
CHRISTIAN
ORIGIN.
A very frequent question put to Secularists is, What
hospitals have you built or endowed? And an equally
frequent assertion is made to the effect that the world owes
all those institutions for the care and cure of the sick to
Christianity. A greater mistake was never made, as I shall
try to show.
In the first place, I make bold to assert that mercy, compas
sion, humanity, and benevolence did not, and could not, spring
from religion. All the Gods, or nearly all, were origi
nally cold, callous, and cruel. They inflicted upon man
(if fables may be trusted) all the horrors he endured, and
then quietly and stolidly looked on while he writhed in
his agony No Gods sinned more in this respect than those
of the Jews, in proof of which I refer to the story of the
Flood, of Sodom and Gomorrah, of the Israelitish march
through the desert, of the conquest of Palestine, and other
tales of the Old Testament. It was only when man became
civilised that the Gods forsook their barbarism, and the very
mercy man learnt in civilised life was by-and-by ascribed to
the Gods. Every kindly feeling man has must have been learnt
in society—must have been produced there, for Nature
knows nothing of kindness, mercy, or compassion. Nature
and the Gods have not only inflicted flood, pestilence,
famine, and fire, upon man and beast, but they never
interfered to relieve the poor wretches of their suffering.
Wherever man, therefore, learnt his humanity and pity,
most certainly no God or religion ever taught him.
Secondly, as most religions have enjoined the belief in
miracles and miraculous cures of disease, their very spirit
has been antagonistic to the founding of hospitals, in
firmaries, and dispensaries. No religion has done moie
�4
HOSPITALS AND DISPENSARIES
harm in this respect than Christianity. Look through the
New Testament, and you will not find a single commenda
tion of medicine, surgery, or any other healing art. All
diseases are there to be cured by miracles ; the physician is
dispensed with, and physic is entirely thrown to the dogs,,
and the priest and the elder are exalted as the miraculous,
healers of both body and soul. Had the spirit of Christianity
been carried out successfully there would not have been a
hospital or anything of the sort now in the world. If this
religion had spread first among barbarians, instead of the
civilised nations of the Roman empire, and if her converts
had been docile instead of independent, we should have
seen, long ere now, what a curse she was to man. But
Christianity inherited all the learning, the arts and sciences,
the laws and social institutions of Greece and Rome. All
these (with few exceptions) she did her best to destroy, and
when that proved impossible, she coolly adopted and claimed
them as her own productions.
What has been said above will tend to show that we owe
none of our best sentiments to religion; but I will now
proceed to exhibit a few facts which will set the matter at
rest, and demonstrate that hospitals and kindred institutions
are not the product of Christianity. In doing this I shall
quote from, and refer to, an article in the current number
(Oct. 1877) of the Westminster Review, on “ Pre-Christian
Dispensaries and Hospitals.” The writer says :—“ It is in
the medical officers, appointed and paid by the State,
that we find the earliest germ and first idea of the
v?s.t. network of hospitals which has spread over the
civilised countries of the world. These medical officers
were an institution in Egypt from a remote antiquity, for in
the eleventh century b.c. there was a College of Physicians
in receipt of public pay, and regulated as to the nature and
extent of their practice. At Athens, in the fifth century
b.c., there were physicians elected and paid by the citizens;
there were also dispensaries in which they received their
patients, and we find mention made of one hospital.”
Turn we next to India. “In the fourth century b.c. an
edict was promulgated in India, by King Asoka, command
ing the establishment of hospitals throughout his dominions;
and we have direct proof that these hospitals were flourish
ing in the fifth and in the seventh centuries a.d.”—they
flourished then for a thousand years. “Among the Romans
under the empire physicians were elected in every city in
�NOT OF CHRISTIAN ORIGIN.
5
proportion to the number of inhabitants, and they received
a salary from the public treasury.”
Leaving the Westminster Review for a moment, I will
quote an extract from Tacitus. Referring to the fall of an
amphitheatre at Fidenae, in the ruins of which 50,000
people were killed or otherwise maimed, he says: “Now
during the fresh pangs of this calamity, the doors of the
grandees were thrown open, medicines were everywhere
supplied and administered by proper hands; and at that
juncture the city, though of sorrowful aspect, seemed to
have recalled the public spirit of the ancient Romans, who,
after great battles, constantly relieved the wounded, sustained
them by liberality, and restored them with care.”—“Annals,”
iv. 65. This extract shows not merely what the Romans
did at this date, about 27 a.d., but points back to periods
long past, when their forefathers regularly relieved and healed
the wounded soldiers. Such a nation, though still dread
fully barbarous in some respects, did not require the aid of
Christianity to set it on the path of humanity and mercy ;
the germs of those virtues had been there for ages, and only
required time to develop. Those who wish to see what
the best Romans, in the first century before our era, thought of
benevolence may consult Cicero “ De Officiis,” Bk. I., 14, 15.
Turning again to the Westminster Review, we read that
even the “ancient Mexicans had hospitals in their principal
cities ‘ for the cure of the sick, and the permanent refuge of
disabled soldiers.’” The Mexicans, by the way, and the
Peruvians as well, were working out a splendid civilization
for themselves at the time the barbarians from Spain dis
covered and ruined them. The more we know of those
ancient civilisations the more we must admire them; and it
cannot be denied that Spain herself was, at the time of the
conquest, more superstitious and less civilised than Mexico
or Peru; the eruption of those Christian savages into
Central America threw back the civilization of the continent
for four or five hundred years. I have nothing to say in
palliation of either Mexican or Peruvian religion; but I
must say that the Spaniards, in destroying those ancient
creeds, put nothing better in their place.
It is remarkable, viewed from the Christian standpoint,
that the Mohammedans were the first people known to
have had asylums for lunatics. As Mr. Lecky says, “ Most
commonly the theological notions about witchcraft either
produced madness or determined its form, and through the
�6
HOSPITALS AND DISPENSARIES
influence of the clergy of the different sections of the
Christian Church, many thousands of unhappy women, who
from their age, their loneliness, and their infirmity, were
most deserving of pity, were devoted to the hatred of
mankind, and, having been tortured with horrible and
ingenious cruelty, were at last burnt alive.”—“ Hist.
European Morals,” ii., 93. While this barbarity, the
genuine and legitimate fruit of Christ’s own action towards
the “possessed,” was practised wholesale among Chris
tians, the Mohammedans were, as early as the seventh
century, housing and nurturing the insane in asylums
at Fez, and they founded another at Cairo, probably about
a.d. 1304. The first Christian asylum for insane persons
was erected at Valencia in Spain, in a.d. 1409, or 700
years later than those first built by Mohammedans. Thus,
it was in the very country which the Mohammedans had
conquered, ruled, and partially civilised, that the first
Christian lunatic asylum was founded, and it is not difficult
to recognise their influence in this humane act. It should
also be remembered that the kind-hearted monk who
founded the asylum in Valencia, did it to shelter the poor
lunatics from the insults, jeers, and other persecutions of
their Christian neighbours, who never allowed them to pass
through the streets in peace.—(See “Europ. Morals,” ii.,94-5.
See also ii., 92).
To quote again the Westminster Review—li The most
remarkable instance of a military hospital was one in Ire
land. The palace of Emania was founded about 300 b.c.,
by the Princess Macha of the golden hair, and continued to
be the chief royal residence of Ulster until 332 a.d., when
it was destroyed. To this palace were attached two houses,
one, the house in which the Red Branch Knights hung up
their arms and trophies, the other in which the sick were cared
for and the wounded healed; this latter was called by the
expressive name Broin Bearg, the House of Sorrow.”
What has been put forward above will be sufficient to
show that we owe neither medicine nor hospitals to Chris
tianity ; indeed, I am not aware that any one ever ascribed
the former to this religion, though it would be just as
rational as to ascribe the latter to it. Neither Judaism (as
found in the Old Testament) nor Christianity (as found in
the New) shows any favour to medicine. The spirit of the
Old Testament may be found in the following passage :—
“ And Asa, in the thirty and ninth year of his reign was
�NOT OF CHRISTIAN ORIGIN.
7
diseased in his feet, until his disease was exceeding great;
yet in his disease he sought not to the Lord, but to the
physicians.” (2 Chron. xvi., 12.) The context tells us he
died; the inference is plain—he lost his life because he pre
ferred medical attendance to miraculous power. The Jews
could not more strongly have condemned medicine than
they have done in this passage, for not only did the patient
die, but the physicians are set in direct rivalry with Jehovah.
And here I may ask how it was that the Jews, who were so
favoured of God, had to learn all their medical knowledge
from other nations ? Their God revealed to them all those
senseless ceremonies found in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers,
and Deuteronomy, but never told them how to heal one
single disease ! Four books, filled for the most part with a
burdensome ritual or instructions in the art of worship,
were vouchsafed by their divinity, but not a word about
healing ! Large portions of those books, too, are occupied
in directions for finding leprosy, but not a word about the
cure of the disease (See Levit. xiii., 44-46). The whole
dress of the priest was prescribed, colour, shape, texture, and
everything—these were of supreme importance, and involved,
of course, the weal or woe of the world—so momentous
were they that their chief divinity went out of his way to
reveal them ; but human suffering was of no concern at all,
and their divinity forgot to reveal the art of healing. Indeed,
he himself claimed the sole right to kill and make alive, to
inflict or to heal disease. All this was fatal to the study of
medicine.
The same remarks, slightly modified, will apply to the
New Testament, where miraculous agency is the only
recognised mode of healing. This may be due to the fact
that the Jews went into captivity in Babylon, rather than in
Greece or Rome, for “ the Babylonians and Assyrians alone,
among the great nations of antiquity, had no physicians.
The sick man was laid on a couch in the public square, and
the passers-by were required to ask him the nature of his
disease, so that if they or any of their acquaintance had
been similarly afflicted they might advise him as to the
remedies he should adopt.” (West. Review, ibid.') How
much this resembles the Gospel story of the pool of Bethesda,
leaving out the angelic descent 1 (John v., 2.) The Baby
lonians were also fond of charms, for they mistook diseases
for devils, as Jesus did. Mr. H. F. Talbot, in his “Assyrian
Talismans and Exorcisms,” quotes a tablet as follows :—•
�HOSPITALS AND DISPENSARIES.
“ God shall stand by his bedside ; those seven evil spirits
He shall root out and expel from his body; those seven
shall never return to the sick man.” This superstition re
appears in the Gospels :—“ Then goeth he, and taketh with
himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and
they enter in and dwell there, and the last state of that man
is worse than the first.” (Matt, xii., 45.) Jesus actually
cast this number of devils out of Mary Magdalene. (See
Mark xvi., 9.) In face of this most debasing superstition,
people still worship Jesus as an almighty and omniscient
God ! And though he, beyond all men, taught the mira
culous causes and cures of disease, his professed followers
claim for him and his religion all the credit of originating
the scientific treatment of human ills. For certain, science
never met a more determined foe than Christianity; but
science no sooner gains a victory than Christianity turns
round and claims all the merit of inventing the very thing
she did her utmost to destroy.
That people bearing the name of Christ have, in modern
times, built and founded hospitals, I cheerfully acknowledge;
it matters not to me what names men bear so long as they
do good. But this I fearlessly affirm, that every hospital
ever erected has been built on or by principles which Christ
condemned, so that if he was right, the founders of
hospitals must have been wrong. Not only did Jesus teach
that diseases were to be healed by miracles (Mark xvi., 17,
18), but he strictly forbade the laying up of treasure : as
pointedly as he forbade murder or adultery, he also forbade
the accumulation of wealth. Without the wealth, hospitals
could not have been built, nay, all must have been paupers.
Religion and religious teaching, had they been obeyed,
would have made the world bankrupt; but in Secular
principles lies the salvation of man. Religion points to
another world, to reach which we must renounce this;
Secularism teaches to make the best possible—in money,
intelligence, humanity, and morality—of this world, and to
leave the next—a mere dream, most likely—to look out for
itself. I admit there are good things in the Bible ; but all
the good it contains would have been outweighed a thousand
times by a simple and effectual remedy for only one disease.
Why did divine mercy omit such a remedy ? Let Christians
explain.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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Hospitals & dispensaries not of Christian origin
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Symes, Joseph [1841-1906]
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Place of publication: London
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Health
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Health
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Hospitals
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Text
t |Jl,
Cannon
ife
Nu&f
I A FREE STATE
AND
FREE MEDICINE.
BY
JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON.
LONDON: F. PITMAN, 20, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.O.
GLASGOW : JOHN THOMSON, 39, JOHN STREET.
1870.
�“ New foes arise
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains.
Help us to save free conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw.”
Milton.
�I.
A FREE STATE, AND FREE MEDICINE.
The pages headed Medical Freedom, appended to this
Essay, formed a postscript to a small work of mine on a
new Treatment of Small Pox, written some years ago.
*
Their re-publication has been undertaken because it has
been thought that they have work to do at the present
time. I wrote them in good part from the theoretical
side, having a clear certainty that the separation of medicine
from government, and from power, and the dischartering
of all medical corporations, would confer upon medicine
and the community the greatest benefits. I foresaw that
freedom had a future here of which protection could give
no inkling; and that Art, Science, Service, Healing, would
live anew from it upon a hitherto unknown scale. I
pleaded gently in the interest of medicine and the com
munity.
The pages are reprinted as they stood, with some medical
topics adhering to them.
But now in the face of recent acts and facts, I plead in
the name and interest of the community alone : of the
consumer, not of the producer: of the British people
struggling with bonds, not of the banded and enthralled
medical corporations and profession. The medical pro
* On the Cure, Arrest, and Isolation of Small Pox, by a New Method ; and
on the Local Treatment of Erysipelas, and all Internal Inflammations; with a
Special Chapter on Cellulitis ; and a Postscript on Medical Fkeedom. London :
Leath & Ross, 1864.
�4
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
fession has crept into the Government, and is inciting it to
breaches of most sacred freedom, and thus is virtually at
war, and dreadful to say is influencing the Liberal and
Freetrade Gladstone Ministry to war, with the nation.
The particulars are not far to seek, and need not detain
me long, especially as I am about soon, in a larger Essay,
to treat of them severally. Suffice it now to say that,
I. War is levied upon the population by the Parlia
mentary Jet of Compulsory Vaccination. Vaccination may
be bad or good in its results; so may aconite, or arsenic,
or the sword; but no goodness of it justifies the violation
by it of unwilling families. Parliament has no excuse for
it. If Vaccination be protective, whoso will can be pro
tected by it; and leave those who do not choose to be
vaccinated, to their own freewill, to bear the risk. A large
and increasing body of the population hates the name and
thought of Vaccination; numerous cases are extant in
every considerable town of deterioration of health, injury,
and death from it, inflicted upon little children; and
coroner’s inquests return verdicts of “ died from the con
sequences of Vaccination;” and yet Parliament arms the
medical man with a right of virus against the babies next
born to those who have thus been slaughtered, and sends
the fathers or mothers who cannot pay continual fines, to
prison. In this Act Parliament commits a breach of the
peace as wide as Great Britain and Ireland, for it directly
incites to violent retribution. It is obvious that riot may
come of it. And it is equally obvious that if a mother or
father can say to the virus-man, “ Sir, I believe in my soul,
from dire experience in my own family, or my neighbour’s,
that what you are bent upon doing to my baby will pollute
its health, and probably take its life, and I will resist it to
the death, and rouse my neighbourhood to resist it,”—it is
obvious that whatever weapon that woman or that man
uses to protect, not only his fireside, but the very blood of
his race; and whatever arousing of the passions of his
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
5
commune he may cause against his poisoners, the public
opinion of the world will justify him, as much as if he
shot down a midnight assassin from his wife’s and child’s
bedside.
Yet Parliament has sanctioned this perpetual felony and
occasional murder in this compulsory Act; and Parliament
will now have to unsanction the Act, and to destroy it.
Nothing of this would have happened if medicine had
had no more to do with Government than any other calling
has; but medicine has got into the State, and instead of
being called when wanted, it is itself ensconced in office;
the State has lost its service, and got its impertinence, and
any foothold of power, or patronage, or pay, that it has, it
will by no means surrender. Old Physic, thus officialized,
revels in the application of the Compulsory Vaccination
Law, and hunts out the children of those who are known
Anti-vaccinators with especial zest. Nor does it forget
that hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling are the
reward of what so many now regard as the pollution and
slaughter of the innocents. The pressure of the despotism
is so urgent, that Vaccinators will not listen to medical
certificates against Vaccination, on the score of skin disease,
whooping cough, or the like : fine, imprisonment, or sub
mission, are the unconditional demand of the Government
doctors.
And this for a disease which killed eleven people in
London last week, while scarlatina killed more than a
hundred.
I am not now arguing against Vaccination, but against
Compulsory Vaccination; but I am prepared to argue un
reservedly against Vaccination itself when the occasion
arises. I know that it is a delusion and an evil, and I have
done with it. But my point here is that chartered medicine
has polluted and endangered the State with it, where un
chartered medicine would have had no chance of doing so;
and that hence arises a mighty practical reason why the
�6
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
State should discharter all medical corporations, withdraw
all royal patents from them, and leave physic, like other
businesses, to its own unaided work; calling it in for
an opinion when necessary, but judging that opinion by no
professional standard, but by wide and high common sense;
and being entirely free to act upon it or not when the
opinion is delivered, and the doctor gone from Downing
Street.
The plainest medical reason, or medical truth, may not
be expedient or good for a statesman to carry out. If
Jenner or Watson could prove ever so clearly that by dis
secting alive the vilest felon some desired medical light
would shine forth, it would still be competent for the
Home Secretary to say, 11 No, gentlemen, wait for that!
A generation had better die without benefit of illuminated
doctors, than that its life should be bought in the coins of
hellish cruelty. That vile man is my brother, and the State
stands in the interest of a higher light and life against the
pretended medical good that is to come of disembowelling
him.”
And so the State shall say one day, better let epidemic
smallpox sweep our towns, than Vaccination outrage hearts
and homes under the pretence of abating it. Not that
epidemic smallpox will do it, dear reader, for epidemic
smallpox is for the most part a panic ; though when it
does occur in a bad form, Vaccination has no power to
protect against it. But better the desolation which medi
cine and sanitary action could grapple with at last, than
the moral and personal violation of the homes and children
of our commonwealth.
II. This, then, is the first battleground between the British
Nation and the Chartered Medical Profession.
*
The
* I refer the reader to the Essay on Vaccination, by Chas. T. Pearce, M.D.,
Loudon, 1868; to the Essay of Dr. Bayard; to the Anti-Vaccinator; and in
general to the publications of the Anti-Vaccination League, for full information
against the Utility of Vaccination, and about the injuries it causes, and the
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
7
second and equally serious, but not more serious, battle
ground, is in the Contagious Diseases Act, lately passed
by Parliament, for districts where soldiers are housed, and
now proposed for extension to the whole civil community.
This Act too, passed surreptitiously under a misleading
name, would not have become law but that chartered
medicine was at the ear of the central Government as its
only adviser. The process evidently is, to send for “ the
most eminent medical men,” and be bound by their advice.
This course is both misleading and servile; and the mis
direction and the servility both depend upon royal charters.
Thus, “ the most eminent medical men,” to a Minister of
State’s apprehension, are inevitably at the head of the
orthodox corporations; and hence the minister gets arrant
orthodoxy, whose power of poohpoohing is its supreme
faculty, in place of wide and varied experience. He gets
infallibility instead of heart and brains. And instead of
getting orthodoxy as an opinion, he receives it as a com
mand ; and if he must have medical action at all, he has
nothing to hold orthodoxy in check as the agent. Even a
Gladstone can call in nobody else but these pampered and
easily incensed Mandarins. Our ministry, methinks, should
be the highest present jury of the country, giving its inde
pendent verdict after patiently hearing professional judge
and professional advocates ; but in such cases as these it is
hopelessly charged and commanded by the bench, and the
barristers are with the bench in overruling its twelveman
common sense, and forcing the verdict against it.
This is well divulged in a paper by an eminent orthodox
medical lady, Miss Elizabeth Garrett. “ Is legislation
increased death-rate that coincides with it. By this practice the medical
profession has introduced a new disease into the human race; and by the two
Acts under question, two new tyrannies are added to the evils of our country.
And in the case of Vaccination, from a practice not a hundred years old, but
which the doctors seen! to think is as durable as the rock of ages, though the
counter-experiment of letting Vaccination alone has not been tried ; and, con.
sequently, there is no test of its value in any sense, excepting as a fee-field of
the doctors.
�8
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
[about syphilitic diseases] necessary ? ” she asks, and
answers, “ This is strictly a professional question, upon which
the opinion of trustworthy medical witnesses ought to be
accepted as final. It is enough if unprofessional persons
know what that opinion is, together with some of the prin
cipal facts upon which it is based.” We have heard of
the Rule of the Monk, in Rome, and here is the parallel
Rale of the Doctor in Britain. You are no longer to call
in the doctor, and employ him as long as you like his
treatment, and judge with your own common sense every
serious proposal in that treatment; but he, or she, by
Heaven, is to call you in, and do what he likes with you !
You are his bond slave, and his word is, Flat experimentuni
in corpore tuo—vilissimo.
“ Is legislation necessary ? ” Who is to answer that
question, Miss Garrett ? Who calls in legislators, who are
a high order of professionals ? The people of course.
Air. Gladstone is where he is because the household suff
ragans have placed him there, and keep him there so long
as they have confidence in him. He is bound to consult
with his employers upon all matters pertaining to their
own bodies and fortunes. He has to legislate in their best
interest. On medical questions he avails himself of or
thodox eminent advice; he calls the doctors in as the
householders have called him in. But he is to legislate;
they are not to legislate. The opinion they give is strictly
a professional one; but the question of whether, or how, it
shall be carried out is not professional, excepting so far as
statecraft is a profession; it is a legislative question ; and
the settlement of it lies in the will of the people, and then
in the derivative wise will of the ministry. If the opinions
of callings were to be converted into the immediate volitions
of the State, we should have a pretty time of it. The
State would be garrotted by a hundred small ruffians of
professions. “ Nothing like leather” would be the rallying
cry of every cobbler’s onset on his premier. Miss Garrett’s
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
9
baker would force her into vegetarianism, for the food of
the people is strictly an eminent baker’s question; and the
chief of the bakers must be “ accepted by her as final.”
A homoeopathic premier might call in homoeopathic emi
nence, and converting his eminence’s answer into an edict,
forbid her salts and senna and blue pill for the rest of her
orthodox days.
A professional opinion, however eminent, is not then a
legislative question at all, but a mere suggestion, unless a
legislator takes it up ; and moreover, the whole unprofes
sional mass of the country is the permanent jury which
gives the verdict of To do, or Not to do, in every case.
What are the grounds upon which a legislator as distin
guished from “an expert” or professsional specialist must
act ? The expert, you will observe, merely takes his own
medical view of the case, modified of course by his good
sense, and moral and spiritual capacities ; but the medical
view is central. The statesman—I do not accept him as
“ final ”—-is distinguished from the lesser professional man
in this chiefly, that he has all the interests, not merely the
sanitary interests, to help and not to harm. First of all,
the interest of impartiality ; that is the justice-rock on
which he stands. Then, co-extensive with the common
wealth, social interests, spiritual interests, humanitary
interests, bodily interests, moral interests. The order and
poise of all these together in his mind, each like the organs
of a sound body pressing the rest into shape and function,
is the ground of the wisdom of every special action of the
statesman; and makes him neither a philanthropist, nor a
divine, nor a philosopher, nor a sanitarian, nor a moralist;
but a legislator, and a professional statesman. His will is
never reached by any other one profession separately.
Woe be to him if ever he allows that will to be first
violated and then traversed by any doctor or specialist who
represents one partial interest where all interests should
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A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
be most generously constellated, and a love and wisdom
above interest itself should reign.
The obverse of this, the position assumed by Miss Garrett,
that the people have nothing to do with her foul physic
but to shut their eyes and take it, is the common stupidity
of chartered and collegiate bodies. I leave it to the reader
to imagine whether such dense darkness against human
right, and the human mind, and the all prevalent good
sense of mankind, is a favourable atmosphere for scientific
studies, or the prosecution of the most free and instinctive
of all the arts, the Art of Healing. For my own part I do
not doubt that the conceit and love of power bred of
charters and patronage rob medical men and women of
their best inspirations, and reduce to a minimum the
humane vigour of their lives.
But to return to the Contagious Diseases Act.
As some of my readers do not know what it is, I will
tell them.
First, it is founded on the present fact that the most of
soldiers must be unmarried ; and secondly, on the pre
sumed fact that unmarried soldiers must have women for
their gratification; and thirdly, on the fact that if their
women are diseased, they disease the soldiers, and cause
added expense for the army. Wherefore, it is expedient
to keep the women well for use, which can only be done
by compulsorily examining them at short intervals, and
when needful, compulsorily curing them. For this purpose
they are summoned from very wide districts, one and all,
and come in crowds, to the place of inquisition, the wallow
ing with the tidy, the vilest with the neatest; and they are
examined, very often (I do not know how often, but it
ought to be tabled) with large steel tubes, called specula, and
if diseased, sent to hospital, and if healthy, let back to whore
dom. Purer women may be brought by the police, by
mistake, or by the plotting of villains by design, into the
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
11
same category ; and if they do not take care, or, as Miss
Garrett says, are “ helpless,” which a good many good
women are, they may become liable to fortnightly exposure
and looking at, and steel entry, for one twelvemonth ; and
their husbands have no remedy, because the Act has con
doned the police mistake, and probably veiled the villain’s
plot, by anticipation.
This system, its advocates say, has diminished venereal
disease in array districts, and also the number of pros
titutes ; where it has been applied with the utmost strin
gency, as in the little island of Malta, it has “ stamped
out ” the disease ; and it only remains to apply it to the
whole of Great Britain and Ireland, to extinguish this
disease altogether. Let, then, every common woman in
the three kingdoms be inspected fortnightly—police super
intendents being the judges of who are bad women—and
let hospitals, big enough to take in all who are diseased,
be erected from one end of the land to the other.
A tall medical vision ! Building contractors who could
get on that shoddy Pisgah, would give a handsome per
centage to chartered and patented physic for the admin
istration of the vast disbursement. They need only read
Mr. Simon’s clear'pamphlet to estimate the amazing carcase
to which they would be fain eagles.
But if you can desyphilize little Malta, till a new regi
ment, or a new ship of war comes, it does not follow that
you can do the same for Greater Britain. When I was a
boy there was a current saying, “ Naturam expellas furca,
tamen usque recurret” You may drive out nature with a
pitchfork, but she will always come back again. If you
could clear all prostitution from the streets, so that the
sharpest police superintendent should not know who is
who, you might only, I will say at present you would only,
drive immorality out of sight, and lodge it higher up in
the community. I should like to know if Devonport,
endorsed by Miss Garrett’s “ clergy,” is more moral
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A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
because its 2000 inspected prostitutes have diminished
from 2000 in 1864 to 770 in 1870. I should like to
know from the dissenting ministers of the district the state
altogether of the 770 who do the work of the former 2000.
It strikes me forcibly, that you may scare prostitutes away
at the expense of bringing up servant girls secretly into
their ranks. And these, being uninspected, all the in
fection begins over again in your own kitchens. And as
masters are often immoral with their servants, and innocent
wives and children must be protected, all you can do then
is to suspect every woman below your own rank, and to
have her inspected ; and presently you will find the old
hospitals bursting with their contents into new ones:
bursting, not like Aaron’s rods, but like spawning serpents.
Truly the medical plot thickens. We have got our reward
for protecting physic ; for adopting Miss Garrett’s principle
that the first topmost medical opinion should be taken, and
that then it should override every other faculty and concern,
and be converted into direct and universal legislation.
Out, I say, upon a protected orthodoxy which would
introduce such a horrid tapeworm into our national con
stitution ; if for no other reason, then for this reason, of
saving bodies and souls, give us freedom from State medi
cine, and let medicine herself be remitted to her own
resources, and have a conscience void of public offence,—the blessing in the humility of freedom.
Could Miss Garrett’s orthodoxy be carried out, Great
Britain would swarm with a vermin of pensioned venereal
doctors more than Spain, or Italy, or Turkey, ever swarmed
with beggar priests. Great Britain would have syphilis
with a vengeance.
But, reader, it cannot be carried
out. The Dissenters will not have it, because they can
scarcely understand the vice of which the diseases in
question are some of the plagues, and they will never
sanction the endowment and establishment of the pre
tended cure of those plagues in the interest of the vice.
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
13
The Municipalities will not have it, because they have
great radical works of good needing all their monies and
means, and they do not hold these to be spent on stopgaps
of an evil which in its retreat will more deeply and des
perately defy them. The public exchequer will not have
it (on its own shoulders), because the prostitutes and their
medical bishops, many tens of thousands strong in London
alone, would devour the treasury. The Married will not
have it, because they see that its tendency is to drive
prostitution, and whatever disease adheres to it, from the skin
of the streets, inwards into homes, and upon the vital parts
of the community. The vast Working Classes will not have
it, because their daughters are those in the main who will
first be invaded by the inspreading of the surgeons and their
poxes. Common Sense will not have it, because common
sense seeks cure and not suppression; and common hope,
which is the sister of common sense, knows that cure is pos
sible ; and that necessity of fornication is a chimera which
has no existence, but is merely the horrible shadow pro
jected before the eyes of a chartered and decayed society,
and cleared at once from the heart and brain of a loving,
an ennobled and a progressive society. The statesmen of
these advancing times will not have it, because it has
nothing to do with statecraft; and because they will see
that they are only general managers for the nation, and that
if in the interest of special people they were to undertake
a special stamping out of evils ; a special hospitalling of all
broken and ruined people, the ground would be cumbered
with a Bedlam-city of hospitals, medical, legal, clerical,
*
commercial, legislative, royal, and the only two classes left,
* Dr. Dalrymple, M.P., is moving in this direction, and asks the State to
erect pillars which will hold all drunkards upright, and Mr. Bruce, the Home
Secretary, instead of teaching the lion, member that the State will be happy
to do this as soon as any great wit shows how the State, which finds it hard
itself to be upright, can hold everybody upright—advises him “ to try his
hand at a Bill on the subject.” Mr. Bruce ought to bo moro merciful to
retired physicians.
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A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
besides statesmen, would be inspectors, and patients.
This, the logical carrying out of the Act, would be hell
realized upon earth, with the Inquisition for its portico.
And last and first, the awakened Womanhood of the
land will not have it. I dare not know, Why, in the
woman’s way, because I am not a woman ; but I do
know that they will not because they will not. Their
reasons are made of fire in such a case, and could burn
up a household parliament which is made of parchment
presently. They will not have troopers fed by govern
ment on the carcases of their sex ; on carcases stamped
with the government permit; they know all over that
state prohibition and non-prohibition are the two halves
in all licensing. They will feel with those eyes of the heart
which see and more than see, which are all senses in one
touch, that the shame days of the state are their shame
days, and that fortnight by fortnight common modesty is
being effaced from the lowest women to the highest ; and
that purity is freshly trampled every time in the slums
of the filthiest rumour. They will know by the heart
the secrets of the prison-house ; the surgeons and the
unwilling women’s bodies ; the struggle and the steel,
office and agony ; the fairest searcht the foulest. They
will hate men while they love them, till men, public and
private, leave bad womanhood unworsened. They will
hate a government which crowns the infamy of prostitu
tion with the last ignominy and wrong, of public state
ravin and state rape. They will hate the medical govern
ment dogma which lies to mothers and sisters and
affianced brides of the necessity of prostitution, and proclaimes it as a natural office of the community, young
and old ; the dogma which postpones love to lust, which
it is woman’s severest mission to correct in man. They
will quell and choke the medical assertion that their baby
boys are born whoremongers, and that some poorer mother’s
baby girls are their predestined skittles in the game of
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
15
ruin. They will believe that God is love, and that Christ
is incarnate love, and that love is the Creator, and love
is the hope, and love is the Redeemer; and they will have
nothing licensed but love which is the licenser. None of
these are dead men’s reasons; but men’s best reasons
unloved and unaccepted by women, will be poor stubble
in the days of fire which are coming, in the days of
woman which are coming, in the holy days which are
coming.
And ah ! later than last, the slow Manhood of the
country will rise upon these Acts, and their authors. The
chronic meanness of the State, which has confiscated
woman to man, which has made the huge freedom of
marriage into the gulf and abyss of her person and her
property, will begin to be avenged from the ground up
wards, and the sexes will tear up this lowest wrong with
even hands. We men in truth have not known what we
were doing. All uncorrected, unchastened, unmated, in
our public conscience, we have been cruel and greedy as
impuberous boys, and have ravaged the holdings and
trampled out the capacities of woman on the floors of long
parliaments. We have been a sour and an unmarried
country. We are awakening and ripening at last. The
scorn of women is awakening us ; the new power of women
is awakening us; the fiery justice of women is awakening
us; the angry commonweal and coming democracy of
women is awakening us; and we are going to help our
mothers and wives and all our sisters out of the State
chains of unrighteous laws and customs. Out of sex
legislation, and sex-oppression. Out of one morality for
women, and another for men. Out of the household
political Mahometanism that women to the State have no
separate souls. Out of the claws of chartered surgery.
Out of homes that are prisons, and out of brothels that
are graves.
It is now no digression to see that the questions raised by
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A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
these two seemingly small acts of parliament directly move
the issue of Woman’s Universal Suffrage. All women have
the offices, of protecting their babes, and of caring for their
own sex to whatever deep depths its unfortunates may
have fallen. The public will of woman is summoned forth
by God’s providence when she is publicly assailed in her
womanhood and her home. That which is coming to
answer the call, is not female household suffrage, for that is
another enchanter and chaunter of property, but true univer
sal suffrage, which is the Word of all Souls ■ truly, I will
say, the voice of God more and more audible in progressive
nations. And these Acts of Parliament, if women will
but speedily stamp them out, will be the beginning of the
dav when not woman’s dishonours, but her soul of honour
will be public; when the State in its coldest departments
will begin to know the beating of her heart.
I have now told you faintly some of the reasons why
this Act shall not be extended, and who those are that will
not have it; and I find on carefully looking round that,
judging by the past, the only things that will have it, if
they can, arc the church and the state, including chartered
physic.
So much then for the extension of the Act. But now I
will say further that the present Army Act will not be kept
on the statute book. In the first place, the army which is
said to necessitate it, must go, and give place to an army
which docs not require an episcopacy of prostitution, or to
no.army at all. We are in profound peace, are giving up the
defence of our colonies from home, and there is no disaffec
tion within our borders which a larger commonwealth-heart
would not appease. Gibraltar, and Malta, and Aden, and
the islands of the sea, ought to belong to themselves first,
and next, to the whole world. Excepting for India, where
a humane system of mounted police in plain clothes may
protect the real interests of the country and our own plant
of railway and other property there, we have no need of a
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
17
standing army. We have less need of an army than the
United States has. But as for the graduation of dis
banding, and putting all the remaining men into plain
policemen’s clothes—the symbols of peacekeeping, whereas
the red coats are the symbols of the glories—of slaughter
of males, and seduction of females—as for the disbanding,
the unmarried men, after the horrid treatment they have
survived, should be paid off handsomely, and sent if they
wish it to Canada, or in the “ flying squadron ” to any
other part of the world ; and the married ones, as a
nucleus to national volunteers, should receive a large incre
ment of pay ; <£300 a-year income will be little enough, and
a farm apiece on the crown lands, or in the ducal deso
lations of Argyleshire and Sutherlandshire; for there is no
more reason why an army should be a cheap thing, than
why a Queen should be cheap, or why an Archbishop of
Canterbury should be cheap, or why a Marquis of West
minster should be cheap. This simple plan will render the
Contagious Act unnecessary.
I object, then, to the present Contagious Act, because it
would bolster up our present bestial system —our Sodom
*
* See what the Government and the household suffragans of this country,
the bishops and clergy, and all the classes whose wealth and state are supposed
to be protected by the army, in short, all but the lower classes and the women,
are responsible for in regard to their army. Dr. Stallard says, in the Sessional
Proceedings of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science,
‘ My attention was first directed to the subject by making an attempt to
determine the most convenient number of soldiers who should be accommo
dated in one room. As to the opinion of the commanding officers, I found it
on this subject in general opposition to that of the soldiers. They advocate
large rooms containing not less than eighteen men, and they prefer those with
twenty-five. They do this on the ground of supervision being more easily
exercised, for, with but few exceptions, they are in favour of complete publicity.
There must be no cupboards, no lockers. If the soldier has any money, or
articles on which he sets store, he must keep them in his pockets since he has
nowhere else to put them; and if he keeps over, from time to time, some
portion of his midday meal, he must expose it on the shelf, where it will soon
be covered with dust and dirt from the sweepings of the floor. But as regards
the men, without exception, they prefer a room for eighteen to one for twenty,
five, a room for twelve to one for eighteen, a room for eight to one for twelve,
B
�w
18
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
and Gomorrlia system—with our poor army; because in
so far as it maintains prostitution healthy, it must make
a room for four to one for eight; and those soldiers who have been quartered
in an old prison, now used as a barrack in Dublin, testified that they were
never so comfortably lodged.
*
*
*
The first and great objection
felt by the decent soldier is the entire absence of privacy. From the time of
his enlistment to the date of his discharge there is not a moment or a place
which he can call his own in the fullest sense of the term. He washes, dresses,
eats, drinks, and sleeps in public. Let me try and represent what this publicity
really means. Of his twenty-four comrades it will be absolutely certain that
two or three will be habitual drunkards, and one or two will have been in
prison for some crime. Some commanding officers expressly order the worst
characters in the company to be quartered with the best, with the view of
reformation; indeed this is one of the great arguments used in favour of the
congregation of so many men together.
“ But, as one black sheep infects the flock, so, instead of improving, the bad
soldier often makes the others worse. Naturally, and unless modified by the
presence of a very superior non-commissioned officer, the moral standard of a
barrack-room is that of almost the worst man in it. The more men the worse
and more extensive is the mischief, and the greater is the discomfort inflicted
upon a really decent man. No doubt the presence of a good barrack-room
corporal modifies the evil; but even the power of the best is limited. He is
only a step above the rest, and his life would be unbearable if he were to be
very strict. He is obliged to wink at a great deal which it is his duty to report.
It is well known, for example, that drunkenness escapes report. A man died
of delirium tremens, at Portsmouth, who had gone to bed drunk every night for
more than twenty years, and yet that man had never been convicted, and held
a good conduct medal. There is also a great deal of behaviour which ranges
between fun and torture, of which the non-commissioned officer in charge can
take no notice.
“ An old soldier informed me that he has frequently known a recruit to go to
bed night after night in his clothes, in fear of the remarks and ridicule which
the act of undressing would certainly give rise to. And the public use of that
military institution called the urine tub, is the moment chosen for remarks and
practical jokes of the most disgusting kind.
“ Woe be to the recruit who has any personal defect or peculiarity, and,
above all, to one who has any religious feeling. The attempt to read his bible,
or say his prayers, will be the signal for an onslaught of bread crusts and
slippers. True, it may be, and doubtless is, that the man who firmly persists
in the performance of his religious exercises eventually is let alone, nay, is even
respected by his comrades ; but how few possess this moral courage, and how
many sink before the shafts of ridicule. Moreover, let the man fail to maintain
his own standard for a single moment, and the last discomfort will be greater
than the first, and his difficulties in maintaining his position will be im
measurably increased. And, whilst speaking of the religious life, I have found
that one of the greatest annoyances arising from the publicity of barrack life
is difference of belief. Episcopalians, Methodists, Independents, Baptists,
Roman Calholics, are mixed up together, and with men who scoff at them all.
A Roman Catholic has no opportunity of performing his religious exercises, and
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
19
into shamelessness hard as steel the womanhoods of its
*
base episcopate; and in so far as it scares prostitution
away, it must drive the foul soldiery in upon our houses;
because the fortnightly ripping open of the moral sore and
sewer is an outrage upon the community, and a day of
sour shame and filthy jeering to the thoughtless crowd;
because it embrutes the sacred medical office, and pays it
for pretending to give away the power of sin and wicked
ness ; and because it is the germ of a system which would
debauch and infect the general public. I object to it also
because it sullies the Government of the country with the
responsibility of finding clean prostitutes for the army, and
spends governmental action upon the diseases of one vice,
which itself is but a disease of the hopelessness and drunk
enness which the present Government army system perwhen in a barrack-room with Protestants his position is often most uncomfortable.
A sergeant informed me that, night after night, there used to be controversies
in his room, lasting through half the night, and terminating, not unfrequently,
in blows. He said officers had no conception of the religious quarrels which
ensued, since they were hushed in a moment if an officer came in.
“ Nor is it possible to get a good night’s rest. Out of so many men some
are sure to be noisy and sleepless; and scarcely is the room quiet when some
drunken or noisy person comes in from leave, disturbing all the sleepers. It
not unfrequently happens also, that some one is ill, either from his own fault or
otherwise, and the atmosphere is rendered unbearable by the occurrences
which unavoidably take place. Nor is the urine tub, which appears to be
considered as the only practicable institution of this nature, conducive to the
comfort of the men. If placed inside the room it is most offensive, and is
occasionally used for most improper and disgusting purposes, and if outside the
door, although less objectionable, it‘is often knocked over by the men who
enter in the dark, and the use of it involves the disturbance of all the sleepers
by the opening and shutting of the door. Another objection to a large barrack
room is the impossibility of warming all alike. One fire is quite insufficient for
twenty-five men. Those placed near it are too hot, those at a distance too
cold. This difficulty can only be overcome economically by having a com
bination of fires and hot water pipes; the fires being central, so that the
soldiers may sit around them.”
* Our lady holds that periodical examination by surgeons does not deaden
but increases honest shame; that the violet, modesty, might even root it
were good at least, she thinks, if it did root—on the hot cinder-hills of lust
with the wind of publicity blowing over them. Who else in the world thinks
this ? Or how could such lack of sympathetic knowledge in a woman exist
exoept by royal charter.
�20
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
petuates in the land and in the regiment. I object to it
in the interest of the bad women, whose persons are
violated fortnightly by State interference, and who are
unjustly selected as the mark for medical legislation, while
the corresponding class, the male whores, whose barracks
are the obverse brothels, are left free to emit infection.
And I recall finally that all this comes of taking not the
opinion of “ experts,” but their domination, and of allowing
them to build place, and power, and pelf, where the most
sacred liberties have dwelt, and where the governing will
of the country, founded on the common sense of plain
men, has been hitherto exercised in the righteousness of a
large impartiality.
Only one condition should justify these acts of a despair
ing and witless legislature: the universal female and male
suffrage of the towns and the large surrounding districts
concerned; a majority of 99 hundredths of the population en
dorsing the inspection under much restriction, which would
leave the prostitute population alone against the commu
nity. And even then the commune should give them the
option of handsomely assisted emigration to some of those
new lands where women are wanted. That would have
some fairness in it. And the vote universal which settles
this, including the prostitute vote, should be taken every
three months, that the working of the base, unhoping, un
curing system might be watched and worried continually ;
and that no settlement and medical plant might grow out
of such a polluted pot. And such examination, for sack
cloths’ sake and ashes’ sake,—for we are all “ fallen,” and
the state and the church are prostitute here in their inward
minds more than the street-walker,—should be transacted
in the cathedral or principal church of the district, except in
cases where the whole of its clergy have petitioned govern
ment weekly for the repeal of the act; and in case of such
petitioning, the examination should be done in the officers’
head quarters ; if in London, in Westminster Abbey, in the
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
21
Houses of Parliament, or the Horse Guards; and the
state surgeons should moreover be attended, for indignant
human nature’s sake, by a stout Vigilance Committee of
self sacrificing women, of pure martyr women, chosen by
universal female vote; and this stout Vigilance Committee
should assess drumhead damages for any injury done
by steel or forcings on the examined bodies. Woman
will so be some safeguard to woman. But as at present
administered, the Act is an unrestricted and condoned
male handling by a small household hard-handed minority,
who have no charter but force, of the secret woes of
human nature, selected promiscuously from many woes;
and the sense of the women of the country upon it is
utterly ignored and despised. I am not a jurist, but I
know by heart that there are rights of the person which
precede and tower over the church and the state ; and
that the parliament which breaks them, is out of all law,
and openly invokes on both sides might against right; and
in so far, proclaims the dissolution of society.
Passing now from the patronage which chartered me
dicine gives to one virus, and the public war which it
moves the State to wage upon another virus, I arraign
its mental sanity in the case of the Welsh Fasting Girl.
Here it undertakes by self elected dictatorship to lay
down the final laws of physiology and psychology; to fix
what is possible, and what impossible, in the period of
abstinence from food ; and to rule the press and the people
by its own sick experiences. It undertakes to immure
the people of these islands in its own narrow materialism.
On this I shall not dwell now, having already shewn in
my brother’s pamphlet on the subject, that old physic has
*
no special lights here, and has very special prejudices and
limitations; and is the worst judge of al!, while common
* The Cases of the Welsh Fasting Girl and her Father, by W. M. Wilkinson ;
with Supplementary Remarks, by J. J. Garth Wilkinson. J. Burns, 15
Southampton Row, 1870.
�22
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
experience interpreted by open common sense is the best.
But I will notice, that this arrogance of chartered medi
cine has been displayed on various other subjects ever since
I entered the profession. When Mesmerism came up,
and nobody knew anything about it, and a few wished to
learn something by experiment, chartered physic appeared
upon every mesmeric scene, and attempted by violence to
foreclose the experiments. It swooped with a royal patent
swoop down upon the people who were investigating;
it knew that the whole exhibition was humbug and im
posture ; and it comported itself with an enormity of con
ceited ignorance such as no one can command or contain
unless he has a permanent conceit pipe running into
him directly from a royal college. And yet, reader, the
subject was new: these little men knew nothing about it
but that they hated it; and they hated it because it en
larged the domain of physiology and psychology beyond
their possession; and their possession was narrow, their
heart was narrow, and their mind was narrow, and their
spirit was not, because their calling was no creation of
God, but a manufacture of state colleges.
*
Oh ! but they ought to pray to be drawn up from this
* On the theoretical side, of science and free thought, Lord Bacon saw
clearly the dwarfing of mankind produced by colleges and academic institutions.
I do not know whether his great perceptive observation was ever directed to
the practical working of the same, or to the public conceit and attempted
despotism which the dwarfs would inevitably seek to exercise over peoples in
the last and expiring days of institutional rule. But what Lord Bacon says is
well worth reading still :—“ And he thought this, that in the customs and
institutes of Academies, Colleges, and similar bodies of men, which are designed
for the assemblage and co-operation of the learned, all the elements are found
which are adverse to the ulterior progress of the sciences. For in the main,
the resort is first professorial, and next for honour and reward. The lectures
and exercises are so managed, that it is not easy for anything different from
routine to get into anybody’s mind. And if it happens to any to use liberty of
enquiry and of judgment, he will at once feel himself dwelling in a mighty
solitude.
*
*
*
In the arts and sciences, as in the shafts of metal
mines, all parts should resound with new works and advancing pickaxes.
And in right reason this is so. But in life it has seemed to him, that the polity
and administration of learning which are in vogue, press and imprison most
cruelly the fertility and development of the sciences.”— Coaitata et Visa.
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
23
poisonous well of establishment and patronage, at the
bottom of which, not for truth, they are lying.
And yet, as is always the case with the eaters and
drinkers of evil, they want more of it. They are now
moving Sir John Gray and Mr. Graves to pass a bill to
“ establish one uniform and practical test of efficiency for
all medical practitioners in the United Kingdom,” in order
that “ patients may be enabled readily to distinguish
between qualified and unqualified practitioners.” Uniform
and practical! The pope’s triple hat and Garibaldi’s red
shirt worn by one sentence; high priests and pharisees,
and Lord Christ, at one table. Procrustes cut off heads
and feet, certainly for uniformity, but he did not pretend
to increase either the practicality, or efficiency of his
graduates; or to make their qualifications more dis
tinguishable by an ignorant public. His simple object was
to make men of all sizes fit his bed. The game of life
and death, the grappling with diseases, the cheering of
lengthened sickness, the calm confronting of pestilence,
the promulgation of sanitary rules to sweeten homes and
villages and towns, the private and the public healing,
seem to me to depend all upon the love and life and spirit
and fearless mind of the healers: the education, at this
stage of the world’s books and scientific accomplishments,
is a thing that can be got anywhere; provided you do
not kill the life, by fixing and instituting and endowing
and chartering and deadening the education ; or to sum
up all, by legislating it uniform.
*
And the public has no
difficulty excepting what one uniform diploma and brass
* The following sentences are by one of the greatest men of modern science:
“ Why do candid physicians every now and then astonish casual hearers by a
hint of the very small progress which therapeutics have made since the days of
Calen ? Why does poor little Medicine, stunted and wizened, cast so wistful
an eye at the strong limbs and bouncing proportions of cousin Chemistry ?
Simply because the unhappy child has been brought up on little but main
tenance of truth, while her relative, lucky in not being committed to the care
of royal colleges, has been brought up on progress of science. Go for progress,
and let truth maintain herself.”
�24
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
plate creates and throws in its way, in discerning between
qualified and unqualified practitioners : every neighbour
hood knows its own men; but then the real qualification
lies in the fact that a medical man known otherwise as a
worthy citizen, cures many people, and can probably cure
me, and certainly will if he can : there is no other qualified
practitioner than this; the school gives the schooling, and
certificates the school-success; but the man’s townsmen
give him the seal of qualification.
The struggle for this uniformity where all diversity
would be more to the purpose, because more living, is
another step in the medical plant for power; another
stride into the state ; and another cogent reason for the
dischartering of all medical corporations. If the uni
formity is gained, the people under its regiments will
have a stupider set of men to doctor them for another
quarter of a generation.
I shall now notice one or two reasons alleged in favour
of medical protection, which are not perhaps touched upon
in the following pages. One is, that medical men are so
received in families, are so deeply entrusted, and so re
sponsible, that unless they are good by Act of Parliament
they cannot be up to the mark of their high calling. This
I confess had not occurred to me until I read it in The
Times of last Saturday (art. Medical Education). It would
be a reason for incorporating under the state all catholic
priests, dissenting Ministers, and in general everybody
who has any work of honesty to do for other people. But
the endowment and establishment of everybody is not
likely to be carried in these ways. The other reason was,
that sanitary work, belonging to the public sphere of
action, and comprising towns and districts in its design,
can be carried on only by public medical officers, who can
come only out of royal colleges, which can be created only
by the State. In the first place, this department belongs
more properly to surveyors and engineers; though the
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
25
occasion of it may now and then be suggested by medical
men. But any one with a nose and eyes can generally
tell whether the house-drains, and the drainage of the
neighbourhood are efficient; and where the outward
senses are not enough, other experts, chemists, and not
practising medical men, are usually called in.
In all
general sanitary improvements, engineering talent em
ployed by the municipality through a Board of Works,
is the agent; and medical opinion is for the most part
nothing in regard to such large and obvious uses. It is
but one little nose, and often not the keenest or most
interested nose, among tens of thousands of noses.
These reasons for medical protection are therefore no
reasons, but the animus which they show in the direction
of getting into official place and power by means of fresh
and more centralized chartering, is again another reason for
severing medicine from the State.
If old physic gained nothing from the change but
good manners, the benefit to itself would be great. At
present, all who dissent from it are quacks and impostors;
or as one good man said of homoeopaths, either fools or
knaves. All who die away from it are victims ; and those
who die (the “ peculiar people ”) refusing medical advice,
lay-expectants, we may call them, must be opened after
death by a regular practitioner, who has to decide if they
would have died had they had proper attention and
medicine from old physic.
One would have thought that
the revelations of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, of out
patients treated each in a consultation of 35 seconds, and
then drugged out of one of six bottles, would have kept
down the crest of pride and self applause from the
medical head centres. That such blatant scandals have
not had any effect of the kind, is a proof that the pride
lies deeper than, and out of, the very worthy men who are
so disfigured by it: and I beg to suggest again and again,
that their unhappy inflation, and proved public inefficacity,
�26
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
are due to their royal laurels, which poison their humane
minds, while they seem to decorate their worldly persons.
The present Government, like its predecessors, is not
distinguished for consistency of legislation. Its chieftain,
the most able actuary and accountant mind for assessing
and winding up the failing estates of our societies, that we
have had for centuries ; who knows well how many shillings
in the pound a bankrupt church can pay to its creditors ;
and who apparently can wind up anything, and bring out
comfortable figures ; that great appraising mind has leisure
to write Ecce Homo, Autobiography, and Juventus Mundi,
in addition to the particulars of the numerous State
properties which he is bringing to the hammer. I wish he
would rather spend his leisure in codifying in some manner
the various subjects which all belong under the class of
freedom, free trade, and free competition. I wish he would
hold councils to look all round, and see how many things
the Government can let alone with clearance to itself, and
with advantage to the public. He might draw up for
the guidance of Parliament a schedule of subjects with
which his Government will not meddle, and the control of
which he expressly repudiates. For it is a disgrace to the
mind of a party that they should be increasing freedom of
competition in some departments, and increasing bureau
cracy in others; that they should stand upon the platform
of civil and religious liberty with one foot, and upon that
of medical despotism with the other: that they should
foster all denominations in civil education, and lend their
aid to extinguish all but one denomination in medical
education : that they should leave the bread of the body
free, and let the nation draw upon the fields and granaries
of the whole world for it; and yet confine the growth and
supply of the bread of healing to the sterile field of one
small artificial corporation, where it might be brought
from all ranks and classes, from all men and women, and
the manifold famines of now incurable things be fed into
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
27
health by it. If our great appraiser does not move in this
direction, I shall be forced to think that he has ulterior
objects ; that he is about thoroughly to endow and establish
poor old physic, in order to purchase, I will not say plunder
it at last; and that when it is bureaucratized from top to
bottom, and all colleges are compact as jails, with one big
donjon over all, and the appraiser in the very midst,—
Mark that, old physic ! the appraiser in the midst!—and
the whole profession rigidly fixed in place and power, and
planted like iron upon towns and villages and rustic disstricts, just when that whole profession says, I am all
official and everlasting now, he will step up and say:
“ Gentlemen, you are sold; the State buys you out: you
“ can stay where you are if you like, by paying such or
“ such a per centage, or by purchasing the goodwill of
“ your own practice,—my practice, I mean,—for so many
“ years; but failing this, as your position is an official one,
“ I shall at once appoint your successor, who will comply
“ with ray conditions. In the eye of the State, and in the
“ millennium of Sir John Gray’s uniformity, one medical
“ man is as good as another: they all come from the State
“ brass plate office ; and the public will be satisfied with
“ any change which includes no variety; for I shall be
“ able to remit public taxation out of the annual millions
“ which accrue from my general practice.” Depend upon
it the great appraiser is going to say this, and Sir John
Gray is preparing it: and other callings and professions
may expect to be sold in their turn. This is indeed a
reason why old physic should throw Sir John Gray over
board as soon as ever they can get a cork jacket on him ;
and pray to be dischartered, disendowed, disestablished,
disroyalized, and to have anything on earth done with
them which will take away the great appraiser’s pretext
for buying them at his own probably very low valuation.
The reader will notice that over and over again I have
returned to the assertion that compulsory bills would not
�28
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
have come from Parliament unless privileged medical cor
porations had possessed it. This by no means implies that
the body of the profession is in favour of these Acts : the
crowned head of the profession, perverted by alliance with
the State, acts without caring about the body, and per
suades the State to follow it. The opposite counsels to
these, lie in the absorption of medical sense in common
sense, thereby raising both into powers serviceable to the
community ; not in the calling in of heterodox instead of
orthodox physicians, for then still you would be in the
hands of specialists, and often of very exacting and narrow
specialists, but in the calling in of the nation, which at
present cannot get near to its life, because all the pro
fessionals and experts have closed round that life, and
monopolized it. “ Come let us reason together,” is the
voice of justice on both sides in all propositions affect
ing the people. Whatever clique hinders this, must be
cast out. But this “ reasoning together ” means universal
suffrage, for what else can it mean ? We are living in
great problems of freedom and compulsion ; and we are
bound to reconcile between those opposite ends. Their
meeting point lies in the coming up of the national free
will, which can compel a free nation, as a man’s free will
compels a man, though nothing less than this self com
pulsion can rightfully compel it. The voice of that national
free will is mere universal suffrage. We have a right to
anticipate what the verdict and execution of that suffrage
would be upon these Compulsory Acts ; we know that
they could not subsist one day in any municipality under
that suffrage; we know that that suffrage would not hold
any parley as the Government has done, with these schemes
of chartered physic. As I said before, the absorption of
all professionals into the general voice, and the issue of
measures from none but the chieftains of that voice, are
the only solvent of the case.
My present word is done, though I hope to come forth
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
29
again soon on the greater subject of The Commonwealth and
the Godwealth. For thirty years I have been actively con
vinced of the inestimable benefits to be derived from
medical freedom. The results of all legislation towards
freedom during that time have deepened my conviction.
Many years ago I translated Swedenborg’s Animal King
dom, a work in which a free layman demonstrated by light
and life that the psychology and physiology of the body of
man are opened up by God to free thought where they are
closed against professional thought. Next I wrote a tract
on the subject of Unlicensed Medicine After that, a little
work called The Ministry of Health. And lastly, the pages
which now succeed under the special name of Medical
Freedom. As I have said at the beginning of these
remarks, the Medical Freedom was designed to show that
medicine would gain everything by being moveable in
itself, and distant from the State ; by being independent,
and internally various and competitive: in short that
medicine ought to stand clear of Government. Otherwise,
uniformity, livery, dwarfing, arrogance, and contempt of
the laws and light of nature and revelation; in short, social
and scientific materialism. And now I have completed
the globe of fact, and given two hemispheres to this free
dom, in demonstrating that the State and the Government
ought to be quite free from and independent of medicine.
Otherwise the legislative and executive will both be played
upon by the perpetual opinions of “experts;” the rule of
philosophers and scientific men will be forced upon the
bodies of Englishmen ; and the Government will be hated
and despised for essaying to carry out greedy theories and
experiments upon the whole people; and for creating an
official army of apothecaries to superintend the costly vio
lation. The latter half of the proof has been in part
practically furnished by the two heinous Acts of Parlia
ment, the Compulsory Vaccination Act, and the Compulsory
Prostitutes Examination Act; two pestilent diseases in the
�30
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
State which it owes to its unloyal yokefellow, chartered
physic.
I owe it now to all my medical brothers and sisters to
say, that though I have spoken hardly of their corporations
as they at present stand, I desire to speak and think
reverently and lovingly of themselves. For I am one of
them, on board their own boat. I am an old medical
practitioner, forty years at the work; I delight in the
calling, and honour it; and hope to die in the life giving
harness of it. And especially do I desire to see us all more
free and open in our hearts and minds; less fearful and
less unbelieving ; looking less to the past, than to God and
the future ; and praying for His inspirations, while we scan
*
all nature and art and books for His instructions. And I
have learnt very deeply from no man, that the way to
advance to all this is by going out of royal swaddling
clothes, and under heaven winning for ourselves freedom
of medicine in the greater freedom of our country.
�II.
MEDICAL FREEDOM.
It is my intention from time to time to offer cases with
remarks, as an easy means of bringing new treatment
and occasional thoughts before the public.
The time is to come when general medical education
will surround my profession so closely, that its narrow
ness and exclusiveness, and its cliques, will give way
under the pressure of the public common sense; and no
authority will be left but the authority of facts. I
have a great hope in me to hasten that desirable time.
For it is evident that the simpler medical truth can
become—by medical truth understand truth in practice,
the only test of which is, success in practice—the more
must enlightened public criticism come upon the doctors,
and give them their qualification in every separate case. A
man’s or a woman’s repute will be his or her sole
authorization to practice. For instance, in the treatment
of small-pox as I have now made it public, any mother
or grandmother may demand the remedies which ensure
the benefits recorded in my book, and if the doctor is not
acquainted wth them, and will not employ them when
pointed out, then such mother or grandmother can take
away his diploma in the case, and either confer it upon
herself, or provisionally upon any other person whom she
may appoint to conduct the precious interests of the family
health. There can be no wise authority beyond her, or
above her.
For competition will be the soul of success here, as it is in
�32
MEDICAL FREEDOM.
every other case. Given any field of nature or experience
to be explored, and all the faculties of man are wanted
for it; all the chances of birth are wanted for it; all the
gifts of God are wanted for it; all the developments of time
are wanted for it; all the freedom of society is wanted for
it; all absence of fear of man, and fear for position, is
wanted for it; all good genius and good ambition is wanted
for it; in short, numberless men are wanted, each mind of
them free, and original, and inspired, as if there was
nobody else in the world; yet each instructed in his lower
walks by the labours of the rest; and all animated by a
common faith in the inevitable co-operation of good with
good, and the inevitable consentaneousness of knowledge
with knowledge, though independence and freedom be
the only law and bond for each.
Free societies, free institutions will necessarily arise out
of this new medical humanity: order most punctilious and
most exacting will arise; but freedom will be the king upon
its throne.
But now we see the reverse of this, and health contracted
and eclipsed in the prisons of medical establishment.
The maintenance of this present condition lies in the
Protection of Physic by the State. Continue this, and an
external and well-nigh irresistible aid is afforded to the
existing general condition of medical art and science, as
against anything which would considerably enlarge it; still
more, which would revolutionize it ever so benignly; and,
most of all, against anything which tends even remotely to de
professionalize it, publicize it, and humanize it. Continue this,
and an art and science which depend upon the natural truths
of God, the capacities of nature, and the genius of mankind,
and which should be nourished most intimately of all on the
One Exemplar of Revelation, and the fact of Redemption—
that art and science are commanded to eat the dry crusts of
Parliament, instead of the manna of heaven and the bread
of the earth; and lawyers and the magistracy stand with a
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
33
ferule of penalties to rap the knuckles and break the explor
ing fingers of discoverers who dare to discover out of
accord with colleges, or who dare to discover at all if they
are not cloister-vowed, and cloister-bred. Out upon such
public insanity. Any other art, similarly narrowed, would
be similarly strangled. Engineering or chemistry, in their
existing condition in April, 1864, protected—or what is
the same thing—arrested by the State, would stiffen into
Chinese imitation, and their soul, which is invention,
would be lost; their worldly motive, which is ambition,
unbounded by other men’s power, would be lost; and their
huge sense of freedom, in which they live and move and
have their being, would be exchanged for the degrading
consciousness of the powdered head and well-fitted livery of
the kitchen of the State.
But medicine must be emancipated, and as the public,
directed by God, will have to do the work, I address my
medical life and thought to the public; and not specially
to the people in bonds.
Yet would I willingly calm the apprehensions of all
professional brethren.
1. Not a college, sect, or diploma will perish when
physic is free from State patronage and protection; that
is to say, unless public bodies choose to disband themselves.
The only power they will lose will be the power of
harming other bodies, or other people not of their way
of thinking. They will gain the power of emulating in
good works and open-mindedness all the useful people
whom they have called quacks, and imposters, and un
qualified practitioners, and who have been the moving
wheels of practice in all ages of the world. They will
gain the humanity of learning from the dog, when he
cures himself with grass, without practising the now
ordinary ingratitude and inhumanity of kicking the dog
that is their teacher.
They will sympathizingly learn
from the North American Indian, and the poor Hindoo,
c
�34
MEDICAL FREEDOM.
the traditional healing virtues they have known since the
earliest ages; and their own old pharmacopeias will be
enriched, not then without acknowledgment, with the
sweet beginnings of simplicity, of nature, and of health.
Nay, the certainty is, that the existing colleges, owing
to the decrepitude of the public mind, always induced
by being protected, will be too enduring.
2. In the new time coming, when Parliament will no
longer prescribe a medical profession, and force the
British people to take the dose, the public will be more
apt than they are now to send for regular and collegesanctioned practitioners; provided the colleges give them
selves no airs, but compete fairly in the medical race.
For the colleges have the start and can enter the
course with many chances of success; provided, again, they
can take to their hearts the new fact of freedom, and love it
as they ought.
At all events we may say it will be their own fault if
they are not the chief ministers at the public bedside.
This, however, will again depend upon the progress of
the art of healing; and institutionally upon other colleges
quite diverse from themselves coming upon the scene, to
enrich medicine, enflame competition and emulation, and
extend the boundaries of that large kind feeling which alone
can melt away professional jealously, and which is the only
climate in which all that is liberal and humane can live.
But would I commit the lives of the community to the
possible intervention of uneducated men ? That, I answer,
is the very thing which has taken place at present, and
which I would invoke freedom to help me to avoid. The
education of the schools cannot fit men for curing the
diseases of their fellows; it is only one way of launching
them towards professional, but not necessarily, healing
life. A man of no Latin, no anatomy, no physiology, is
every now and then a good physician, though he sits on the
lowest forms of society. He is educated for that use,
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
85
though he cannot write his own name. By freedom, bring
him into rapport with the light of learning, if you can; but
at all events kill not the Divine power which is in him of
doing good, because he is not educated up to your bench.
Perhaps you are confounding education, which is the
accepted art of making gentlemen, with that grander
education, or leading forth, which every man can have,
and which consists in giving him freedom and a career,
that his orginal gifts may be led forth by their own way and
his own way, into each one’s promised land of a useful and
associated life. To confound these two educations were a
mistake; for the great physician, look you, may come in a
beggar’s guise. There are no uneducated men save the
men that cannot do their life-work. Their success in that
gives them their diploma of knowledge every day. And
no college can take it away from them. And none ought
to have the power of obscuring it, by insisting that it shall
be pasted over with an artificial document of State paper.
Want of skill and want of care in medical practice
amount to so much unjustified death per annum; but
who supposes that state protection of physic can in
crease the amount of skill in the medical community ? The
State, it is true, can exact from everyone, that he or
she shall pass through a curriculum of preparatory studies
and hospital attendance, to fit him to enter upon practice.
But of the studies, many may be useless, except as
accomplishments. From the studies, many useful ones
may be left out, owing to the bigotry of the elders. The
diploma may be sought as the shield of protection to the
doctor rather than as the shield of health to the patient.
Numerous men naturally qualified for medicine, born
doctors, may be, and are, shut out from their life-work,
by the expense which confines the practice of physic to
the abler classes. All the State licentiates leaning upon
their diplomas, are apt from the very security of their
position to be mastered by a conceit in which natural
�36
MEDICAL FREEDOM.
skill must languish. To be built up against freedom, to
be privileged, is to be built up against nature ; and gifts
of God, which in this case are given first in the heart,
will be small where the receivers of them deny the exer
cise of them to their fellows. To be inhumane to your
brother man, to be chartered against him, is a bad pre
paration for ministering to the sick, or the departing.
The root and basis of medicine is the love of healing in
the universal heart and mind; the stem of it is the in
stinctive perception and light which is born to penetrate
into health and disease; the branches, and the twigs and
the leaves of it are the specialities of perceptions from the
nature and the spirit of mankind; which become special
in the course of experience; the love of healing reigning
and animating in every one of them. Mere experience in
its widest range is the soil the tree grows in, and the
climate in which it lives. You may garden, you may deepen,
you may purify and enrich this experience as you like; but
the tree grows through all the world, and sciences, and
societies, and states have nothing to do but first not to
define it, not to hinder it; and second, to help it if they
can.
If it wants pruning, the force of public opinion
and public criticism, and the pressure of public safety,
are the only instruments that can lop its sacred life; and
all these will play an immeasurably greater part when
State patronage has passed away.
And now suppose you had broken your leg, and it was
badly managed by a regular doctor, a surgeon by Act of
Parliament; and that I had broken my leg, and it was
badly set by an unlicensed bonesetter; would not your
bad man, in an action at law, be far more likely to escape
from you scot free than my bad man? You know he
would; because he would be in the fortress of legality in
the first place; and because he belongs to a powerful
clique which will gather round his incapacity, and stand
up and speak for him; and unless it be a very gross case,
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
37
say they could have done no better, and that his ante
cedents are perfect. The pressure of public safety towards
each individual is therefore greatly diminished by official
izing a medical profession; thus causing them all,
army-wise, to support each other, and giving them official
irresponsibility toward the suffering and the sick. And
if you could take away bonesetters and quacks altogether,
the medical profession would be utterly uncriticised and
unamenable. We may sum up this branch of the subject
with the axiom, that the more medicine is under the
protection of the State, the less can its practice be subject
to public opinion, or be under the correction of the law.
An impression has been sedulously culivated, that
anatomy and physiology, pathology, and various other
branches of science, are the healing virtue in the world,
and that they, and written Practice of Medicine, con
stitute positive faculties in man; whereas they are mere
books, or at the best outlying experiences. Not one of
them has any direct relation, any ride of thumb, to a single
case that will hereafter occur. In every instance they
require to pass through a living medical perception to
be of any use. That perception and all that belongs
to it, is, as I have said before, a spiritual thing, and
must only be fed, but not substituted or overlaid, by
knowledge. It is an appetite for doing good and
working cures, and experience and knowledge must
feed it; and this must take place upon true social con
ditions ; that is to say, all the men who belong natu
rally to the calling, must be encouraged by the absence of
State interference, to take their places at the Board of
Healing.
For, mark you, all science and experience depend for
their cultivation upon numbers of the right men: so many
earnest men to the square mile of medical truth, and
you will have greater crops of knowledge than if only
half the number were employed. And if you take away
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MEDICAL FREEDOM.
protection from this medical corn of humanity, you will
have more colleges to grow it; waste lands of many
minds, never cultivated before, sown with it; more
sciences, more extensive anatomy, physiology, pathology,
pharmacy, rising up from the new interest and curiosity
of the enfranchised medical masses; a greater closeness
of these sciences to the matter in hand; and a quantity of
non-medical minds, who have been forced by mere birth,
parentage, and genteel education, against their grain, into
the cultivation of healing, will be unable to stand the
natural rivalry of born doctors of all classes, and will
betake themselves to other callings. In the meantime,
there will not be more medical men, unless society re
quires them, but there will be a constant tendency ever
increasing, that there shall be none but truly medical men
associated with the medical wants of the people.
This flush and influx of spirit and nature into the call
ing, will greatly—nay, incalculably—alter the spirituality
and naturalness of the art and its ancillary sciences. Much
will then be able to be done by genius and instinct, which
is now only vainly attempted by the cruel senility of an
effete profession. For the matter stands thus:—Nature
and its sciences must be cultivated, according to the
present exigency and mission of the human mind ; for these
are the natural and scientific ages. Medicine must be
extended, falsely or benignly, from the pressure of the sick
upon the sound. The world of work revolving with giddy
velocity, brain and heart, and man and woman, call aloud
for central power to enable us to stand upright in the
rapid revolutions. If the medical faculty — I mean the
cohort of healers out of all men—is only one-tenth nature’s
strength, and nine-tenths noodledom from one class only,
the one-tenth must cast about savagely, and most arti
ficially, for the missing nine-tenths of their natural mind
and their natural array. Failing to combat disease on
such unequal terms, they must endeavour to generate
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
39
power, which is another name for inspiration, instinct, and
genius, out of mere sciences ; and these very sciences per
petually disappointing them they must necessarily cudgel
until there is nothing left but analysis and detail. Woe
then to the bedside when knowledge itself is dust and
ashes; and woe to nature and her feelings when the rack
and the thumbscrew are applied as the only known means
of eliciting her loving, and on any terms but love’s, impe
netrable secrets.
All this has gone on in our time and for ages past, but
now to clear understanding. If the medical calling had
been true to nature, and to human nature, in which free
dom and the order that springs from freedom are abiding
facts, the monstrosity of vivisection, of cutting up live
animals, never could have been thought to be a means to
the healing art. The great gorilla of cruelty could never
have been regarded as an ally of the Great Physician.
Perception, instinct, genius, the inspiration of Christianity,
which by making men love each other is the heart and soul
of all human arts, would have had it given to them to heal
diseases without the need of any suggestion from a torture
in which the demons must rejoice. It would have been
seen at once that to lay one knife edge upon a living
creature was to cut the supreme nerve that carries the
emotion of humanity right out from religion into the
medical mind. It would have been known instinctively
that the power of healing, coming as it should do from
Christ direct, is from that moment paralytic; that the
steady will can no longer lift it, and that the good it still
does is in momentary spasms from the lower emotions of
the man. How different from the river of power, pro
ceeding down the Divine steeps, terrace by terrace, to
humanity at large, through faculties which are essentially
humane.
And this horrible vivisection is a type of the other
distorting arts and sciences which the false cramping of
�40
MEDICAL FREEDOM.
medicine into a State-built profession is one active means
of producing.
Chemic, static, and material reasoning
have as little to do with restoration of health as physiology
founded upon the cutting up of living animals. Observe,
I do not deny that vivisection may, as other analytic
methods have done, contribute hints, in the ages while
man is still cruel to man, to practical medicine; but I
deny our right, even with chloroform to stupify animals,
to gain knowledge in this way. There are robberies and
murders in nature, and science has no more right to live
upon their spoils, than citizens have right to retire into
comfortable drawing-rooms for life upon the proceeds of
daggers and dark lanes. There are better riches for man
and science than these, and immeasurably better ways of
acquiring them. Time was when the cutting up of living
criminals did contribute to the progress of physiological
knowledge. There is no doubt of that; but even Dr.
Brown-Sequard would scarcely advocate the practice as
legitimate at the present day. And now the feelings of
every one of his cats and his crows is worth more than all
the science which their maltreatment has ever brought
into his store.
Before quitting this branch of the subject, let us notice
that the State also lends a heavy pressure to discourage
the introduction of women as medical practitioners. This
it does by chartering irresponsible public bodies, such as
the colleges of physicians and surgeons, who deny the
right of examination to women, however gifted or accom
plished they may be; and these brave women, few at
present in numbers, and with no public support, are
obliged to submit without appeal to this corporate des
potism which has grasped the keys of the door of medical
practice. Surely here, as in all other human things, the
law is freedom and experiment. If woman aspires to try
her hand in healing the sick, what is the justification of
that power which would deny her the trial? You think
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
41
she had better mind her own business, and attend to her
house and its concerns; but why then do you not mind
yours, and leave her to herself? If she has not tried the
medical life, how is it possible to know what will come of
her trial? You cannot penetrate a chemical, or a fact in
anything, by thinking; you must have experiment, which
has made all the difference between the dark ages of
knowledge and the light ages. Especially in human capa
cities you must have experiment: and without freedom,
which State patronage inevitably destroys; you cannot have
experiment. True, woman may be altogether unfit for
this work, but let her try, which is the one only way to prove
her unfitness. Do not with your State sword of ungal
lantry cut her down in her first exercises, because you
think she ought not to succeed. I do not know whether
she will succeed or not, and that is clearly no affair of
mine; but J do know that if I deny her the right to her
experiment, besides being guilty of the most cowardly
meanness and unmanliness, I am denying in the highest
instance the divinely ordained and only successful principle
of all the arts and sciences — I am crushing the very
masterpiece of experiment.
In short, medical social science reposes on the ground
of medical social experiment, just as natural science reposes
upon the ground of natural experiment.
Instead then of cutting up living animals, favour by free
dom the putting together of living humanities; favour
in this way at once the highest synthesis and the highest
experiment; and be assured that if no other good comes
from it, disburdened and leisure-gifted human nature will
become the vehicle of a spirit and a fire, of a generosity
and an insight, of a thankfulness and a penetration, of a
love and of a life, before which Isis will let drop her veil,
and the artificial difficulties which have barred and frozen
out the long lost way to the positive ages will be melted
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MEDICAL FREEDOM.
from before our advancing feet by the smiles of nature
herself.
Bnt besides excluding without trial one half of the
human race, and perhaps the better half, from the inspired
pursuit of healing, State interference also confines the cul
tivation and practice of medicine virtually to the middle
classes. That is to say, it ordains that the genius of the
physician is only to be found in one rank of society. It
erects a property-qualification for exercising the gifts of
God in the chief of the inspirational arts supported by the
chief of the sciences. Apply this all round, and how
absurd it grins upon us. Imagine that Parliament should
insist that no painter, sculptor, poet, or musician should be
born in the upper or the lower ranks ! What a belief
in caste, and Chinese artificiality would this imply; and
what an atheistic denial of gifts, of genius, and of the
mission of Nature’s noblemen, wherever they may be.
And yet Parliament, without intending it, virtually does
all this for the medical estate, by interfering to give privi
lege to colleges of the middle class, which thenceforth
inevitably proceed by financial arrangements, and enforced
studies, to make a man first a gentleman in accomplish
ments, and afterwards to let him be a medical man if his
gifts lie that way; and to dub him so in any case. This,
too, is against social experiment, and affronts nature in her
scientific regard. It is the great source of quacks among
the poorer classes ; the said quacks being evidently persons
with some gift for medicine, but with no means of an
education.
Emancipate medicine from State-trammels,
and poor men’s medical colleges would arise, and compete
not ignobly with the other colleges. The poor could then
be attended by educated people of their own sort, at small
expense, and the masses generally would be raised by
having their own unscorned natural professions, and a new
class of bluff honest common senses and artisan ways of
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
43
natural life and thought would be added to these noble
arts. The medical instinct and inspiration of humanity
shall stand upon their feet in the masses.
Nor, then, would medical nature be cashiered, as she
now is, of the splendid culture and chivalric honour and
insight of the upper men and women.
What Lord
Napier was to logarithms; what Lord Rosse is to astrono
mical experiments; what the Duke of Sutherland is to
rescue from fire ; what Wellington was to war; and Prince
Albert to the republicanism of the arts and sciences,
that might other lords and ladies be to practical medicine,
and the inventions which it so much needs. But make
it essentially a middle class affair, and the lower classes
cannot bring their gifts into it, and the upper classes
will not. Yet it is against all reason to suppose that
the noblemen and gentlemen of Great Britain do not
include a per-centage of medically gifted men ; and also
that the same is not true of the people. The fact that
as a rule they yield no recruits to the divine mission of
curing disease, is of itself sufficient to show that some
devouring artificiality is preying upon them; and that a
huge injustice is done to gifts for which we are heavily
responsible before God, and to our fellow men.
The
protection of medicine by the State is that artificiality
and that injustice. Remove it, and with it you begin
to remove the baneful belief—now all but universal—
that medical men can be created by culture; that real
culture can come from without, and that the nature and
gifts of the men are of second-rate importance.
Nay,
in the very act of removing it you reverse that creed,
and make the gifts primary, and set the culture in the
second place.
Will you have less culture for that?
Oh! no, infinitely more! The gifts will become then so
sacred, and the responsibility of them so exacting, that
the sharp and genial powers will raise colleges before
which the existing ones could pass no examination, but
�44
MEDICAL FREEDOM.
great and corporate though they be, would inevitably be
plucked. Where there is a will there is a way. And
the great way is natural knowledge; but the will in
its purest manifestation is only another name for the
determination of our gifts.
And now, to turn the tables, having shown the
blighting and vitiating influence of State patronage upon
medicine, there is another branch of despotism quite
of an internal kind, which deserves to be recorded and
protested against. There is the attempt to subject me
dicine, not to State law, but to scientific law; the aim,
as the phrase goes, to make it into a positive science.
The truth is, as I have stated before, that medicine
is not a science at all, although nourished and fed per
haps out of all sciences; Medicine is an Art, and an
art reposes upon a gift of God, and according to the
intensity of that gift it is called genius, and according to
its native and willing openness to the powers above it
becomes inspiration. And that art summons and em
ploys all the faculties for its furtherance; among them, all
the scientific faculties, and seeks instruction and advance
ment from them all. But because it is an unquestioning
rush of instinctive life from the man into his world and
his calling, it cannot be dominated by any rule or
principle whatever less than the love of medical good,
and subordinate^ and as a means the love of medical
truth. No doctrine or rule must ever be allowed to
invade that centre, any more than the geography of the
earth must be palmed upon the sun. If you attempt
to work it by rule, some one ambitious principle will
extinguish all the much needed others, and you will have
war first, and then inconceivable narrowness in your mind.
You will fall into sects, and at the entrance to each Mrs.
Grundy will stand doorkeeper in your soul. You will
not venture to prescribe what you know would do good,
because it is not of your self-chosen rubric; and because
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
45
your fellows will call you to account for a breach of your
bond. You will cease to look all round for means, and
will wear the blinkers of so-called principle where the
precipices of your own and your neighbour’s danger de
mand the foot of the chamois, and the eye of the eagle.
Heaven help you, you will be accoutred for blindman’s
buff when you ought to be king of the terrible Alps.
And all for what ? that you may pretend to an exactness
which nature disowns; and may enthrone the tiny frame
of material science upon the colossal ruins not only of art,
but of faith.
It cannot be done; there are no positive sciences but
those of man’s own making—the houses which he has
built, and in which therefore he can be supreme—the
rest are all fluctuating, and so full of mystery before
and behind, so meant also for usefulness and not for ab
soluteness, that careful and humble science may indeed be
a positive ship, made in excellent human docks, but
the great, and desiderated, and unattainable knowledge
is the sea itself, and God is in that sea. The bark rocks
and floats, and the further it voyages, and the more it
moves, the less likely is it to founder in the inscrutable
deep. Let it not want to become more positive than
speeding flight can make it; let it not attempt to drop
the anchor of conceit in the unfathomable places. Let it
not dare to say of any spot in the Divine ocean—This
is mine, and here I will abide !
These matters may sound abstract, but they are of
immense practical significance, and play an important
part, for good or for ill, at the bedside. For if you find
a practitioner who has a doctrine which he considers ab
solute, and who derives his art from that doctrine, two
bad consequences will follow. In the first place, he will
set an overweening value upon the science, pure and simple,
of the case he is treating : the exacting doctrine in him
will have an unnatural appetite to be fed out of that
�46
MEDICAL FREEDOM.
science; and the regard of the cure as an end will be
perpetually confused by the regard of the science as an
end.
I have felt this so strongly myself in practice,
that I have been obliged to put it down: and to tear up
in my mind all magisterial doctrines and principles, and to
rewrite them on neutral and subservient parts of myself
in a humble and ministerial capacity. By this means,
however, I hope I am attaining to a wider as well as
exacter science in the end: a science which radiates from
the conscious intellect of cures. But in the second place
the doctrinaire practitioner will be bound, or greatly
biassed,—by his own mind; by the surveillance of his
doctrinaire patients, whom he has helped to make into
pedants; and by the medical clique to which he belongs—
not to do anything which outlies the doctrine which is
his creator. Suggestions apart from that doctrine will
tend to reduce him to a chaos. What treble fear all this
implies ! What a slender exploration of the means of
nature ! What a regard to a centre of the fancy, when
sad and bleeding facts lie calling for pity, and ought to
avail to take one quite out of oneself, and to make one
gather succour from all things. Instead of this, the first
care is to practice within the doctrine, and to use no
weapon but what the armoury of the doctrine contains.
It is true you may have the highest confidence in the
doctrine, and may believe it is a universal rule, but the
universality is only a belief, and not an established fact;
and no number of human lives can make it more than
a belief; that is to say, a probable, and in the ratio of its
probability, a growing and a useful science. Neverthe
less, you have no right to limit your powers of doing
medical good to such a belief or such a science. Observe,
it is not the science but its mastership that I impugn.
And I do impugn it, because it limits you with no com
pensation ; and because in a vast number of serious cases
it does not succeed; and because where it does succeed,
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
47
you have ever a duty to demand a greater success, in
greater rapidity and perfectness of cure. But here again,
your masterful doctrine tells you that when you have
served it faithfully you have done enough.
It will easily be seen that all this applies with force to
Homoeopathy, a doctrine to which I owe so much; in
which, so far as it goes, I thoroughly believe; and which,
whenever the supreme end of cure and my means of know
ledge allow, I unreservedly practice. I regard Homoeo
pathy as the grandest natural and material feeder which
has yet been laid down by the genius of a man from the
nature of things into the spiritual body of the healing
arts. Yet Homoeopathy is but a doctrine, a science, and
a rule, and I will not derive medicine from a science,
or confound it with a science; on the contrary, the science
of Homoeopathy itself is a beautiful child and derivation
of an advancing medical art. Let it occupy a central,
a solar place in the science of therapeutics by drugs.
There it can subsist. But no man can do good by ig
noring any of the wide realms which lie around it and
beneath it, and which are the domain of the collective
medical mind.
I have been allowed to discover that certain formidable
diseases, small-pox to wit, can be treated tuto, cito et
jucunde, with a safetv, rapidity, and absence of suffering
hitherto unknown, by simple external applications. In
the first place, I had a powerful desire to cure my patients
well, and a dissatisfaction with the present standard of
well, in all schools. This desire in its measure is the
natural heart of healing. Then, in the next process, I
knew that Hydrastis soothes irritated mucous surfaces,
and sometimes skin surfaces, and I thought I would try it
on the face of small-pox. The only science here involved
was an acquaintance with the drug, and a little reasoning
by analogy. I tried it, and it succeeded marvellously.
And since then I have the art of applying it correctly,
�48
MEDICAL FREEDOM.
increased by the experience or knowledge of several cases.
And I have faith and confidence in its being a future
blessing to the public; a saving of innumerable healths,
and faces, and lives.
But where is the positive science in all this ? A little
good knowledge suffices for a great deal of good practice.
It strikes me that I have been as little scientific as a
skilled blacksmith who makes a horse-shoe in a given
number of strokes. Of course he knows what he is about
with great accuracy; but that is all you can say of his
knowledge. The rest is educated instinct, and excellent
smiting. He may read about iron and heat, and the
biceps and triceps muscles of his arm, in over hours ; and
he will better his mind by it, and not hurt his strong
sinews ; but the science of his art must not intrude itself
book-wise into his forge, unless as fuel, or he will soon be
a bad professor and spoil horse’s hoofs.
Take the obverse, and suppose that I had enthroned
the Homceopathic principle above my mind, and that I
had to grapple with dreadful small pox. The exigency
then becomes, to cure with a medicine which will produce
symptoms as nearly similar as possible to those of the
disease. I know no drug which will do this except tartar
emetic in one case which I have seen. I should therefore
have had to cast about through the whole of Pharmacy
for the drug in question; to reason by analogy from small
symptoms to great ones, and perhaps I should have reasoned
wrong; and after all I might never have found what I
wanted. And when I had found it, I should have lacked
precedent for applying it externally. In the meantime,
what patients unrelieved and unsaved might be waiting
at the doors of my positive science before I could throw
them open and invite the sufferers into relief and into
health ! Perforce, I must have hardened and narrowed
and thus satisfied my heart, to let such sad waiting go on.
And at the best where would be the gain to science ?
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
49
Science is but the register of success ; and 1 should have
had no science of shortening the disease, no science of
curing the disease, no science of anything, but the worst
sort of expectancy; the science of contentment with bad
things, and the science of waiting for science. In the end,
not Homoeopathy, but the small-pox would be my king.
To obviate this I stood upright, as I have been grad
ually for some years now endeavouring to do, and regarded
Homoeopathy, and all other means and pathies whatever,
as my appointed servants, and myself as the servant of
healing. And now I had no jealousies among the servants,
because I gave no privileges to any; and I could pick
and choose from all means, regardless of the overweening
ness of science, of the sectarianism of patients, and of the
despotism of medical cliques. In short, I essayed to be
free in my art; to wait upon Heaven, and to use all
ministers and faculties in their degree of service. Feeling
the blessed power of this position, in contradistinction to
the cramp and weakness of my old one, I am in duty
bound, even against the charge of egotism, to impart it to
my fellow men.
What then, it may be asked, becomes of Homoeopathy ?
I answer that it takes its place exactly according to its
proved services, and stands upon the irremoveable foun
dation of its cures. It will be all that it ever was, the
most suggestive thing in the round of Pharmaceutical
science. Its dogmatism and its hugeness of minutise will
be cashiered, and Homoeopathy will be the stronger for
losing them. It will be girded afresh for a magnificent
servitude to the ends of healing. Its martyrs will still
prove medicines on their own bodies, but with an almost
exclusive attention to cardinal results. Its registers of
symptoms, curtailed by good sense, will be mastered by
those who court intimacy with drugs, and studied con
tinually afresh where the art of the physician requires it.
The only difference will be, that Homoeopathy will become
�50
MEDICAL FREEDOM.
enormously progressive, because it will have no authority
and no privilege, and will be obliged to subsist upon cures.
Reduced, so far as authority goes, to equality with other
medical sciences, it will become primarily ambitious of
suggesting remedies, and cease from provings which leave
out the human memory, and constitute a new matter and
faculty of absolute dust. But it will no more quarrel with
other means than the mariner’s compass quarrels with
the sextant, or the sails with the steam-engine of the ship.
Above all, mere instrument that it is, and mere instrument
that all science is, it will never go mad again, and believe
that it is the captain of the medical crew; for that captain
is the Great Physician Himself, and all His sons and
daughters in the plenary freedom of His art.
�As a record and a protest I here reprint a Letter on
Vivisection, which appeared in the Morning Star of the
20th of August, 1863. See p. 40.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE “STAR.”
Sir,— From my heart, and also from my head, I thank
you for your leading article on Vivisection in to-days
paper.
I hope and trust that through the subject of
vivisection now publicly opened, and the controversy
going on, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals will become affluent enough to have special
correspondents and reporters wherever vivisection is prac
tised under medical sanction. If the horror is to be, let
us know it, and let us judge of it.
If science is to be
born from the throes of animal life, let us also be duly
horrified and agonised, and suffer with the sufferers.
I have long been of Sir Charles Bell’s opinion that
vivisection is a delusion as a means of scientific progress.
Of course its results, like any other set of facts, constitute
a science in themselves ; so do the results of murder,
and so do the results of picking pockets; an exact science,
if you like; and the earlier parts of the science will of
course be subject to correction by the later; and thus
vivisection may show, and has shown, truths and errors in
the special walk of vivisection. The science of animal
agonies, like all sciences, can be corrected, eliminated, and
completed by experiments of fresh and ever-fresh agonies.
But it has been a mistake to suppose that we were in the
path of the humane sciences — in natural physiology,
natural symtomatology, or within millions of leagues of
medicine, when with rack and thumbscrew and all torture
we were the inquisitors of the secrets of animal life.
Under such circumstances nature is inevitably a liar, and
an accomplice of the Father of Lies. I know that her,
�52
VIVISECTION.
and his, very lies are a science ; but then they are not the
science we take them for, nor the science we want. They
are not mind-expanding, heart-softening, or health-con
ferring science.
Vivisectional anatomy has contributed to medicine—
meaning by medicine the healing of diseases—virtually
nothing, but false paths and wrong roads.
Morbid
anatomy has contributed marvellously little. Anatomy
has done far less than is supposed, though it keeps the
eyes of the physician’s imagination open, and enables him
to tally conditions and symptoms somewhat with parts and
organic structures. If the internal parts of the human
frame were a closed page to-morrow, so to remain for the
next half-century, and if the symptoms and results of
disease, and what will mitigate and cure them, were the
only permissible field of experiment, the art of healing
would lose nothing by ceasing to hold intercourse with the
sciences of structure and function—at all events, for a
time.
For example, I assert that the whole science of tubercle
is trivial and valueless in its results upon the curing of
consumption ; and equally inefficient in showing the cause
of consumption ; and that cod liver oil and general régime,
which have no logical or real connection with the morbid
anatomy of consumption, are the present important me
dical agencies for the treatment of that condition. And I
assert that the whole science of the vivisectional and
morbid anatomy of diabetes ; the artificial production of
it by lesions of the nervous system ; the conditions of it in
the liver, the lungs, and the kidneys, have nothing to do
with its cure, and throw no light upon its cause ; and that
the fact that in some instances it can be cured by the
Hydrastis Canadensis, the Leptandria, and Myrica cerifera,
has never yet been pointed to by any scalpel ; and is
likely to be resisted by the men of the scalpel longer than
by many others. What has the grand experience that a
�VIVISECTION.
53
certain herb or drug will cure a disease, to do with a
knowledge of the particular wreck that that disease
has left in the organisation after death?
Pathological
anatomy, except in surgical cases, never suggests cure.
Now then, sir, let us take stock in this great assize of
humanity and the healing art versus the cutting up of
live animals. Let us have tabulated statements of the
discoveries and results, and of the gain to man, which have
accrued from the introduction of vivisection. The great
facts, the benign arts that have been drawn out of the
intestine agonies of animals, can be easily stated in lines,
and columns of lines, if they exist. Let us have them.
We have had vivisection enough. Whole menageries have
been kept here and in Paris, and all over Europe, to have
their brains sliced and their bodies mangled. It has gone
on for hours a day, and year after year. What is the
stock in hand of results to humanity, to healing, or even
to permissible science?
For, good doctors, there are
sciences, and you will find it out, that are not permissible.
It would not be permissible to suspend a man or a woman
by a hook, to know ever so exactly how they would
writhe; no, not even if you were a painter.
And
therefore, I use the word, “ permissible ” science.
And I
say, that if you cannot show some mighty results, far
greater than the discovery of cod liver oil, and of the
circulation of the blood, your persistent vivisection leads
only to abominable sciences, and to the blackest of all the
black arts, the art of turning the human heart into
stone; after which the gutta serena of cruelty will soon
obliterate the poor eyesight of medicine.
Your constant reader,
J. J. Garth Wilkinson.
Brettell, Printer, 336a, Oxford street.
��
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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A free state and free medicine
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Wilkinson, James John Garth
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London; Glasgow
Collation: 53 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: Inscription on front page: 'M.D. Conway Esq. from the Author'. James John Garth Wilkinson was a homeopathic physician, social reformer, translator and editor of Swedenborg's works. Includes a letter on vivisection by the author to the editor of the Morning Star 20th August, 1863. Includes bibliographical references. "The pages headed Medical Freedom, appended to this Essay, formed a postscript to a small work of mine on a new Treatment of Small Pox, written some years ago [1864]" [Page [3]. Printed by Brettell, London. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
Publisher
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F. Pitman
John Thomson
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1870
Identifier
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G5385
Subject
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Health
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (A free state and free medicine), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Conway Tracts
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
Health Services
Sexually Transmitted Diseases
Smallpox
Social Medicine
Vaccination
Vivisection