Once granted the possibility of medical dogma, there can be no limit to the number of dissenting sects. As a matter of fact, only three or four are entitled to serious notice in an educational discussion. The chiropractics, the mechano-therapists, and several others are not medical sectarians, though exceedingly desirous of masquerading as such; they are unconscionable quacks, whose printed advertisements are tissues of exaggeration, pretense, and misrepresentation of the most unqualifiedly mercenary character. The public prosecutor and the grand jury are the proper agencies for dealing with them.
Sectarians, in the logical sense above discussed, are (1) the homeopathists, (2) the eclectics, (3) the physiomedicals, (4) the osteopaths. All of them accept in theory, at least, the same fundamental basis. They admit that anatomy, pathology, bacteriology, physiology, must form the foundation of a medical education, to use the words broadly so as to include all varieties of therapeutic procedure. They offer no alternative to pathology or physiology; there is, they concede, only one proper science of the structure of the human body, of the abnormal growths that afflict it. So far, they make no issue as against scientific medicine. Much is involved in agreement up to this point. The standards of admission to the medical school, the facilities which the schools must furnish in order effectively to teach the fundamental branches, are the same for all alike. A student of homeopathy or of osteopathy needs to be just as intelligent and mature as a student of scientific medicine; and he is no easier to teach; for during the first and second years, at least, he is supposed to be doing precisely the same things.
At the beginning of the clinical years, the sectarian interposes his special principle. But educationally, the conditions he needs thenceforth do not materially differ from those needed by consistently scientific medicine. Once more, whatever the arbitrary peculiarity of the treatment to be followed, the student cannot be trained to recognize clinical conditions, to distinguish between different clinical conditions, or to follow out a line of treatment, except in the ways previously described in dealing with scientific medicine. He must see patients and must follow their progress, so as to discover what results take place in consequence of the specific measures employed. A sectarian institution, being a school in which students are trained to do particular things, needs the same resources and facilities on the clinical side as a school of scientific medicine.
Sectarian institutions do not exist in Canada; in the United States there are 32 of them, of which 15 are homeopathic, 8 eclectic, 1 physiomedical, and 8 osteopathic. Without attempting to indicate the peculiar tenets of each, we shall briefly review them as schools, seeking to ascertain how far they are in position effectively to teach, quite regardless of the individual doctrine each sect may desire to promote.
None of the fifteen homeopathic schools[1] requires more than a high school educa-
- ↑ Hahnemann (San Francisco), Hahnemann and Hering (Chicago), state universities of Iowa and Michigan, Southwestern Homeopathic (Louisville), Boston University, Detroit Homeopathic, Kansas City (Kansas) Hahnemann, New York Medical College for Women, New York Homeopathic, Pulte (Cincinnati), Cleveland Homeopathic, Hahnemann (Philadelphia), Atlantic Medical (Baltimore).
