Physician, Heal Thyself
Walsh, James J.
January 19, 1927 THE COMMONWEAL 293 PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF
By JAMES I N AN article on Crime and the Alarmists, which appeared in the October number of Harper's mag- azine, Clarence...
...The medicine of them is, that they be bound, that they hurt not them- selves and other men...
...As an international official, however, he is bound to express in some degree the feelings of the countries which regard emigration as a necessity--Germany, Poland, Austria, Jugo-Slavia, in fact, all middle and southern Europe...
...That must be quoted in its entirety to be really appreciated...
...For some seven centuries the greatest list of names connected by any bond in medical history, greater than that of any medical school faculty in the world, has been the list of papal physicians, that is, the men chosen by the Popes to be their personal medical attendants...
...Darrow's own falling into exactly the same fault that he so prop- erly deprecates in others...
...A spectre is haunting Europe" were the first words, and "Workers of the world, uniter" were the last...
...The causes are all there except heredity, and that is a con- dition and not a cause...
...Darrow should look to his sources...
...National differences, and antagon-isms between peoples, are daily more and more vanish- ing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uni-formity in the mode of production and in the condi- tions of life corresponding thereto...
...Brown, one of the secretaries of the International Federation of Trade Unions, sounded the keynote in the opening speech: The great phenomenon of post-war times has been the increase in the regulation of migration and its restric- tion...
...Note the causes~passion, business, too deep thinking, over-grief, over-study, dread, infection, melancholy meats (autointoxication) or alcoholic excess...
...PERILS OF MIGRATION By HENRY SOMERVILLE T HERE will be some readers who remember the opening and the dosing words of the Communist manifesto of I848, written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels...
...The man who discovered J. WALSH the circulation of the blood in the lungs, Realdo Colombo, was at the moment papal physician and professor of anatomy in the medical school at the papal university at Rome...
...Brown appears to incline to the belief that congested and impoverished coun-tries may raise their standards of living by birth con-trol...
...Mr...
...It exists in a great many manuscript copies...
...And namely such shall be refreshed, and comforted, and withdrawn from cause and matter of dread and busy thoughts...
...Mr...
...Further: "The workingmen have no country...
...Sorcery, witchcraft, and magic were the only methods of treatment permitted and the physician was obliged to risk his liberty and life in treating insanity as a disease and seeking to under- stand the causes back of the phenomenon...
...What we want to dwell on here, however, is not the crime situation and its statistics, but Mr...
...The United States was not represented...
...His words were significant...
...A world labor congress was held in London some time ago...
...For some cry and leap and hurt and wound themselves and other men, and darken and hide themselves in privy and secret places...
...It is chiefly the tendency toward restriction which is responsible for the decline in the figures...
...This was about the middle of the sixteenth century, shortly after the publication of Copernicus's great book on the heavens...
...and Varolio after whom the pons Varolii in the brain is named...
...Migration was the specific subiect the congress was called to consider...
...Now, let me place beside that a paragraph of about the same length written almost exactly seven centuries ago by Bartholomew the Englishman whose brief en-cyclopaedia of general knowledge was the most con-sulted book in his time and for the next three or four centuries...
...One of the earliest of these known to us is the famous Simon of Genoa, the medical attendant of Pope Nicholas IV (1288-1299-) who did so much to make the use of opium more scientific than it had been, and who established definite rules for its administration...
...There were some conspicuous absentees from the congress...
...Moreover, Mr...
...The international organiza-tion of the proletariat was itself the spectre to govern- ments and governing classes...
...Japanese delegates were expected but were detained by another conference at Geneva...
...They were uniting, however, not against cap- italists, but against other workers ; and the spectre was, not class revolution, but war of the workers of con-gested, low-wage countries against the rich new world which bars their entrance to a share in its prosperity...
...and the first announcement of his new theory of the heavens was made in the papal city...
...Bartholomew's book was meant for priests particu- larly in order to help them to understand the Scrip-tures and above all to explain the meaning of them to the people...
...Bartholomew has a paragraph on mad- ness or insanity...
...Statistics are proverbially unreliable...
...And they must be gladded with instruments of music and some deal be occupied...
...Since 1848 we have had the great war, not to men- tion other examples of national differences and antag- onisms between peoples...
...That paragraph is so condensed that it would need a long commentary to make it properly appreciated...
...The Italians are most vitally affected by immigration barriers, but owing to Fascism they are not in the International Federation of Trade Unions...
...In the first two or three years after the end of the war, European ports were crowded with emigrants waiting for ships to take them overseas: now the ships are there, but the emigrants, espe- dally those of eastern and southeastern Europe, are shut out of the United States, which received the great bulk of emigrants before the war...
...Bartholomew said: Madness cometh sometime of passions of the soul, as of business and of great thoughts, of sorrow and of too 294 THE COMMONWEAL January 19, 1927 great study, and of dread...
...sometime of melancholy meats, and sometime of drink of strong wine...
...He makes a series of em-phatic statements about the history of medicine, of which it is perfectly evident that he must know next to nothing...
...The symptoms--diverse, but dassed as excitement and depression, mania and melan- choly...
...Copernicus himself was a physician and had studied in Rome...
...Brown is the English secretary of an inter-national federation...
...Some of the most serious abuses come from people who mean very well and who are quite unconscious of the fact that they are uttering statements that are altogether unsubstantiated by the figures to which they make their appeal...
...Figures can be made to say almost anything that the person who collects them wants to affirm...
...Each century after, more and more of these distinguished men came to occupy the position that was considered the highest honor in the medical world...
...We have only established this r6gime in our insane asylums in the past generation...
...Hundreds of thousands of unfortunate insane men and women have been put to the severest tortures even down to the most recent times...
...it was printed early in the history of printing, 1472, was reprinted a score of times before the end of that century, was translated into most of the languages and seems to have been a favorite reading of Shakespeare...
...It is the most condensed account of mental disease to be found anywhere and it comprises more information that is of definite significance even in our day than I have ever seen brought together in similar brief form...
...It is even more astounding to find that such an expression comes from a lawyer who presumably ought to know something about the course of legal prosecution and the reasons for it...
...The workers of a good many countries of the world were uniting and they showed to the world a spectre...
...They trembled at the thought of a workers' revolution...
...But there is another paragraph of the introduction of Mr...
...The treatmentwkeep them from hurting them- selves or others, give them recreation and diversion of mind, gladden them with music, give them manual occupation...
...and a little later, Malpighi who discovered and gave his name to more structures in the human body than any other man in the history of medicine...
...sometime of the biting of a wood-hound [mad dog] or some other venomous beast...
...After Colombo, came Eustachio after whom the Eustachian tube is named...
...Restrictions scarcely affect the English worker for he has an open door to the British dominions...
...Among them in the fourteenth century are such men as Arnold de Villanova, who had been the professor of medicine at the University of Paris, and Guy de Chauliac, who is usually hailed as the father of mod- ern surgery...
...Think, for instance, of an intelligent man in our generation suggesting that "for eighteen cen-turies, over most of Europe, medical men were pun-ished often in the most terrible ways for seeking to find out the causes of disease and for attempting to treat illness by scientific methods...
...Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat," said the manifesto...
...It was called by the International Federation of Trade Unions and it in- cluded the most famous Socialists and Marxians in Europe...
...January 19, 1927 THE COMMONWEAL 293 PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF By JAMES I N AN article on Crime and the Alarmists, which appeared in the October number of Harper's mag- azine, Clarence Darrow called attention to the very inadequate grounds on which intensive deprecation of the increase of crime in our day is founded...
...Darrow's article that represents an even more startling excursion by him into the history of medicine than that with regard to the poor persecuted physicians "for eighteen centuries...
...Often they were summoned from a distance and usually they were the representative medical scientists of their time...
...But there were Indians to speak for Asiatics, and Canada has very much the same view- point as the United States, while Australia was there to assert the rights of exclusiveness in the most extreme form...
...History has de-veloped very differently from the anticipations of both those who desired and those who feared revolution...
...The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster...
...Since that time practically every generation has seen one or more distinguished men occupying the position of papal physician...
...Europe is as anxious to emigrate as ever...
...His text-book of surgery, La Grande Chirurgie, is one of the most interesting contributions ever made to this department...
...And as the causes be diverse, the tokens and signs he diverse...
...Insanity, too, was for many centuries thought of as possession by devils and the punishment of the afflicted individual was the favorite treatment for driving out the demon...
...but here is this dear old Franciscan recommending it in a book that was written for the clergy nearly seven hundred years ago...
...We would have been glad to have had more of the results of his personal observation and fewer of the wild state- ments he makes as the result of superficial knowledge...
Vol. 5 • January 1927 • No. 11
