maternity cases if at all; the Cambridge student must travel an hour or more to the Chelsea Hospital, a pay institution of from ten to fifteen rooms.
The mercenary character of osteopathic instruction is nowhere more conspicuously displayed than in the dispensaries, designed in theory to turn a humanitarian impulse to educational account. The osteopathic schools insert a cash nexus: the patients almost always pay. At Kansas City students give treatment to patients who pay three dollars a month; those paying more are treated by the professors. At Kirksville two dollars a treatment is charged. The cases are mostly chronics, an instructor being present at the first treatment; afterwards, only if summoned. At Los Angeles the cheapest obtainable treatment is three dollars for "examination” and one month's treatment before the class; at Des Moines the “professor administers to high-priced patients, the students to others."
The eight osteopathic schools now enroll over 1800 students, who pay some $200,000 annually in fees. The instruction furnished for this sum is inexpensive and worthless. Not a single full-time teacher is found in any of them. The fees find their way directly into the pockets of the school owners, or into school buildings and infirmaries that are equally their property. No effort is anywhere made to utilize prosperity as a means of defining an entrance standard or developing the “science.”[1] Granting all that its champions claim, osteopathy is still in its incipiency. If sincere, its votaries would be engaged in critically building it up. They are doing nothing of the kind. Indeed, in none of the sectarian schools does one observe progressive effort even along the lines of its own creed. And very naturally: dogma is sufficient unto itself. It may not search its own assumptions; it does well to adopt from the outside, after forced restatement in its own terms.[2]
In dealing with the medical sectary, society can employ no special device. Certain profound characteristics in one way or another support the medical dissenter: now, the primitive belief in magic crops up in his credulous respect for an impotent drug; again, all other procedure having failed, what is there to lose by flinging one's self upon the mercy of chance? Instincts so profound cannot be abolished by statute. But the limits within which they can play may be so regulated as to forbid alike their commercial and their crudely ignorant exploitation. The law may require that all practitioners of the healing art comply with a rigidly enforced preliminary educational standard; that every school possess the requisite facilities; that every licensed physician demonstrate a practical knowledge of the body and its affections. To these terms no reasonable person can object; the good sense of society can enforce them upon reasonable and unreasonable alike. From medical sects that can live on these conditions, the public will suffer little more harm than it is destined to suffer anyhow from the necessary incompleteness of human knowledge and the necessary defects of human skill.
