Some one sends us a copy of the Washington post with a heavily headlined dispatch from Chicago. The gist of it is the forecast made by Dr. W.E. Nieberger, of Bloomington, Ill., before the Illinois Homoeopathic Medical Association, which runs as follows:
“The world is rapidly approaching socialism and paternalism. The state is assuming more and more responsibility which once rested on the individual. This nowhere is so evident as in the field of medicine, and even now in Germany doctors are paid by the government.
“The time is comparatively not far distant when the medical profession of this country will come under direct control of the state, and paid employees of the government will look to the public health.
“The physician will be primarily a biological engineer and teacher, as the name means. He will be the efficiency expert in the mating of man and woman and the subsequent rearing of children. The time is rapidly approaching when the physician will not only cure disease, but will prevent it.
This is sensational else the Associated Press would not have telegraphed it, but whether state medicine will come to pass is open to doubt. It will if the allopaths, or “biological engineers” can force it through. If they do the homoeopatic doctor will have no job under it, for he is not loved by the allopaths even when he tries his best to be friendly with them and falls in with their ever shifting beliefs. Neither will the public stand for paternalism, if one may judge from things seen and heard, and the growth of beliefs, like christian Science, which, at bottom, is but a rebellion against the dominant and domineering medical opathy is founded on the bed-rock os Science, and it seems to us that it is unwise for its men to join in the dervish dance going on to-day among the “science” crazed. Some may say that this is putting the thing too strong, but in an eminent scientific journal just to hand we read of a new preparation, which “is an extract of human syphilitic organs, used to give a cutaneous reaction in diagnosis of syphilis.” Soon we may look for things compounded according to the prescription by the witches to Macbeth when he would look into the future. Yet it is said to be scientific.
