Page images
PDF
EPUB

by Dr. X. It would be altogether unprofessional for me to listen to his tale. I can only cut him short by telling him that I shall be delighted to meet Dr. X. in consultation about his wife's case if he should desire it. It would be utterly wrong for me to listen to the details of the case and then to hint that it seemed to me that if so-and-so were done she might get better. You should always be ready to visit a case in an emergency for a professional brother who may not be within call. Such a visit should be at once reported to the attending physician and the fee for the visit be charged by him. On no account should any disparaging remark be made about the physician on whom you have conferred a favor. Tomorrow some patient of yours may need his assistance when you are not available. You must never take charge of a case where another physician has been in attendance till you have been assured that he has relinquished the case or been dismissed in due form. "When a physician who has been engaged to attend an obstetric case is absent and another is sent for, delivery being accomplished during the vicarious attendance, the acting physician is entitled to the professional fee, but must resign the case on the arrival of the physician first engaged."

With regard to fees the Principles suggest that while no one in need should be refused professional services, if honestly unable to pay for them, yet physicians should not give gratuitous services either to individuals or societies able to pay. Club practice is the most thankless work a physician can undertake. It is the worst paid both in money and gratitude, but under present conditions it is a necessity to young men commencing practice, as it is an excellent introduction to the public. The Principles suggest that the physicians in each community should come to some agreement on the minimum charge for each class of case and that these should be rigidly adhered to. It is needless to say that no self-respecting physician advertises, except in so far as the publication of his work in respectable medical journals for perusal by his fellow doctors can be called advertising. The only advertising you can do is the reputation which steady, careful, honest work will make for you, and fortunately, the public, and especially the ladies, are fond of talking about their doctors. I quote from the Principles: "It is derogatory to professional character for physicians to pay or offer

to pay commissions to any person whatsoever who may recommend to them patients requiring general or special treatment or surgical operations. It is equally derogatory to professional character for physcians to solicit or receive such commissions."

To the public at large and to your own immediate community you are in a position to be of peculiar service. High gifts and special education have special responsibilities and it is your duty to be ever ready to promote all measures for the advancement of the public health. Typhoid, scarlet fever, smallpox, diphtheria, consumption and even malaria are undoubtedly preventable diseases, and it is your duty in spite of constant discouragement to do your best to have these eradicated from your city and your State; as far as possible your patients should be taught to lead healthy lives, and courts of justice have a right to command your services in the interest of law and order, no matter how disagreeable such work may be. Should pestilence in any form get a hold in your community, it is your duty to be at your post, sacrificing your lives if need be. As occasion may require you should not fail to warn the people of the great harm done by charlatans, patent medicines, safe cures, cancer remedies, faith healers and Christian Scientists. Many lives are sacrificed because valuable time is wasted in such useless or harmful methods of treatment when only early skilled attention could have saved the patient. And really the druggist in selling such quackeries is only a shade better than the quack who lives on the credulity of the people.

I congratulate the graduates in Pharmacy in that they are prepared to join the ever-increasing ranks of the Alumni of the School of Pharmacy throughout the State of Texas. Ten years ago the School was regarded rather with disfavor than otherwise in the State, but the spelndid enthusiasm of the Professor of Pharmacy and the confidence which his men are winning throughout the State from druggists and doctors have put the School of Pharmacy on as firm a basis as any Department in the University. We all know that the few years which a young man might spend in a doctor's office are worse than valueless in the matter of teaching him medicine, and the old way of training druggists by an apprenticeship in a druggist's store was about equally useless as a scientific training and productive only of that half knowledge which is more

dangerous than utter ignorance. The best efforts of the doctor are much impaired if ignorance or unscrupulousness fills his prescriptions with worthless drugs or useless substitutes, and you go out into the State well prepared to dispense with skill and accuracy the drugs on which lives may depend, and to recognize the comparative value of the many preparations of drugs, many of them valueless, which are put upon the market. Let no future intercourse with smart methods of business soil the pure ideals which your Alma Mater stands for so nobly. Let no bread and butter considerations persuade you to become or at least remain connected with any drug firm whose business methods you can not approve, and when you have business of your own let your stand ever be for pure drugs and skilled dispensing. Take the public as a mass, they are exceedingly ignorant of the difference between the druggist and the doctor, and are constantly assailing the druggist for something for a cough or cold or stomachache or something of the sort, and one of the besetting sins of druggist is prescribing for diseases of which they knew absolutely nothing. They thus do the public a gerat injury, and it is only their ignorance that can excuse them for the risks they run of endangering human life and health. This sin is not confined to small establishments. The oldest and bestknown druggists in the country are among the greatest sinners. I warn you that you never can tell without a medical training when apparently trivial symptoms may indicate grave maladies, and no druggist has any right to give a man even a simple, harmless remedy for an apparently trivial complaint, and tell him if that doesn't make you all right you had better see a doctor, and this is the most harmless form that counter-prescriptions takes. And great manufacturing druggists are the greatest sinners, sinners by wholesale, not retail. Daily they flood our offices with samples and literature about worthless preparations which they describe as all potent and to cure. It is the gross ignorance of a very large number of our doctors, so-called doctors, from inferior schools, with which this country is overrun, that pretend to teach medicine and are simply diploma mills, that make the fortunes of manufacturing druggists. The State of Texas pays this School of Medicine $40,000 for salaries and Pharmacy, $3,000 for laboratory and $5,000 for library and current expenses, yearly, to teach Medicine

and Surgery, and we are spending the money with the utmost economy, and are doing honest work, but our teaching is falling short of our ideals. How is it possible for a few doctors gathered together under the name of a medical school to give the time and energy or supply the instruments and reagents necessary to do decent teaching, on the returns from the fees of a few students? It is these schools which turn out the men that make fortunes for manufacturing druggists. Two other things I beg of you, that you will set all your influence against the sale of patent medicines and opium and coca and their derivatives. You have no right to share the risk of giving drugs of which you know nothing for troubles of which you know nothing. There are no safe-cures, no universal panaceas, no mother's friends, no all-potent safe tonics for suffering women. The number of women that have acquired drug habits by using patent medicines and proprietary tonic wines represents a weight of misery of which only the doctor who has knowledge of the skeleton in so many family closets can have any idea. In the name of all that the name of Christ stands for in a Christian nation, I beseech you, do not take a share in helping a brother or sister to the devil.

Finally, ladies and gentlemen of all the graduating classes, you have acquired much knowledge and have great responsibilities. Keep the personality and ideals of Jesus Christ, the Great Physician, before you in all that you do, and as you live up to them, so will you one day leave the world full of honor, with the respect and love of your fellow men, and with the approval of your own consciences.

MIRABEAU BONAPARTE LAMAR.

EUGENE C. BARKER.

1. A Sketch of His Life.

As one might infer from his name, perhaps, the second President of the Texas Republic carried in his veins the hot blood of La Belle France. His Hugenot ancestors fled from the persecutions of Louis XIV., it is said, to find a refuge on this side of the Atlantic in that haven of religious freedom, the Carolinas. We are told, and may

well believe, though history is silent as to some of the details, that the name "has been often distinguished in war, in literature, jurisprudence, and politics." By the end of the eighteenth century the family had drifted southward to Georgia, and here, on the 16th of August, 1798, in the town of Louisville, Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar was born. Of the tender loyalty of his parents to the homeland and their earnest devotion to the cause of human liberty, his two Christian names speak volumes.

Of Lamar's early life only a bare outline can be given. His education, so far as one is to be obtained from schools, was very limited-no classics, and only such notions of reading, writing, arithmetic and grammar, he tells us, as a primary school afforded. This, however, was not due to want of opportunity. His parents were well-to-do, and would have been glad to send him to Princeton: but his nervous, impetuous temperament rendered the monotonous routine of school life unbearable. This is greatly to be deplored, for the lack of systematic training, at least negatively, is now evident in all his subsequent career. A great fund of information, supplied by desultory reading, combined with a native facility of expression to conceal this deficiency from his contemporaries, but perhaps he himself came in time to realize it. Certainly his share in the establishment of the present school system of Texas is abiding proof of his belief in the importance of education.

In 1819, at the age of twenty-one, he established a general merchandise business in Cahawba, Alabama. Trade could not have flourished, for he found time to do a good deal of scribbling, besides carrying on a considerable polite correspondence. At best, indeed, he probably made but a half-hearted shopkeeper, and he soon abandoned the undertaking entirely to become editor of The Cahawba Press. No copies of this paper are at hand, but it was doubtless a very modest sheet. It furnished Lamar a congenial occupation, however, and may have helped to foster in him political aspirations. At any rate, when he resigned in 1823, to return to Georgia, it was with the avowed intention of "going into politics."

Lamar's brother, L. Q. C., father of the well-known Senator of the same name, from Mississippi, was already prominent in political circles of Georgia, and young Mirabeau began his own apprenticeship as private secretary to Governor George M. Troup. Of the

« PreviousContinue »