exploits."In no case has a competent osteopath made a failure in his attempt to build up a paying practice.... His remuneration, counted in dollars, will be greatly in excess of what he could reasonably expect in most other lines of professional work."[1] "It is only fair to say that many of our graduates are earning as much in single months as they were formerly able to earn by a full year's work.'"[2] "The average osteopath has a better practice than ninety out of every hundred medical practitioners."[3] "A lucrative practice is assured to every conscientious and capable practitioner."[4] "The graduate who does not make as much as the total cost of his osteopathic education in his first year of practice is the exception."[5] Standards these concerns have none; the catalogues touch that point very tenderly. At the parent school at Kirksville an applicant will be accepted "if he pass examinations in English, arithmetic, history, and geographybut if he should fail to meet these lofty scholastic requirements, he may be admitted anyway. In Massachusetts—the most homogeneously educated state in the Union—the Cambridge school diplomatically posits that "a diploma may be accepted or an examination be required if deemed advisable by the directors,"—the word "is" being conspicuous by its absence; the Pacific College, "chancing it," finds that "most make good."
Whatever his notions on the subject of treatment, the osteopath needs to be trained to recognize disease and to differentiate one disease from another quite as carefully as any other medical practitioner. Our account of the sect proceeds wholly from this point of view. Whether they use drugs or do not use them, whether some use them while others do not, does not affect this fundamental question. Whatever they do, they must know the body, in health and disease, before they can possibly know whether there is an occasion for osteopathic intervention, and if so, at what point, to what extent,etc. All physicians, summoned to see the sick, are confronted with precisely the same crisis: a body out of order. No matter to what remedial procedure they incline,—medical, surgical, or manipulative,—they must first ascertain what is the trouble. There is only one way to do that. The osteopaths admit it, when they teach physiology, pathology, chemistry, microscopy. Let it be stated, therefore, with all possible emphasis that no one of the eight osteopathic schools is in position to give such training as osteopathy itself demands. The entire course is only three years. In so simple and fundamental a matter as anatomy—assuredly the corner-stone of a "science" that relies wholly on local manipulation—they are fatally defective. At Kirksville the accommodations are entirely unequal to the teaching of its huge student body. Hence the first year is devoted to text-book study of anatomy, part of the second year to dissection; at Kansas City they consider that the student dissects better if he has learned anatomy first: hence
- ↑ Catalogue, Pacific College of Osteopathy, 1909–10, p. 9.
- ↑ Catalogue, Los Angeles'College of Osteopathy, 1909–10, p. 9.
- ↑ Catalogue, Central College of Osteopathy, 1908–9, p. 22.
- ↑ Catalogue, Philadelphia College of Osteopathy, 1909–10, p. 48.
- ↑ Catalogue, Massachusetts College of Osteopathy, 1909–10, p. 10.
