QUACKERY
…..The fact that a certain section of medical opinion supports the existing laws is surely no argument for their justice and reasonableness. A certain section of medical opinion, in late years, has succumbed to the messianic delusion. Its spokesmen are not content to deal with the patients who come to them for advice; they conceive it to be their duty to force their advice upon everyone, including especially those who don’t want it. That duty is purely imaginary. It is born of vanity, not of public spirit. The impulse behind it is not altruism, but a mere yearning to run things. A physician, however learned, has no more right to intrude his advice upon persons who prefer the advice of a Christian Scientist, a chiropractor or a pow-wow doctor than he has to intrude it upon persons who prefer the advice of some other physician.
….It is constantly argued by the proponents of legislation against quacks that it is necessary for the public safety–that if it is not put upon the books, the land will be ravaged by plagues, and that the death-rate will greatly increase, to the immense damage of the nation. But in all this there are a great many more assumptions than facts, and even more false inferences than assumptions. What reason is there for believing that a high death-rate, in itself, is undesirable? To my knowledge none whatever. The plain fact is that, if it be suitably selective, it is extremely salubrious. Suppose it could be so arranged that it ran to 100% a year among politicians, executive secretaries, drive chairmen, and the homicidally insane? What rational man would object? I believe that the quack healing cults set up a selection that is almost as benign and laudable. They attract, in the main, two classes: first, persons who are incurably ill, and hence beyond the reach of scientific medicine, and second, persons of congenitally defective reasoning powers. They slaughter these unfortunates by the thousand–even more swiftly and surely than scientific medicine (say, as practised by the average neighborhood doctor) could slaughter them. Does anyone seriously contend that this butchery is anti-social? It seems to me to be quite the reverse. The race is improved as its misfits and halfwits are knocked off. And life is thereby made safer and cheaper for the rest of us.
H.L. Mencken
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Feb. 28, 1927
