Incorporating ST. CLOUD COOPER, Fort Smith, Ark. T. D. CROTHERS, Hartford, Conn. S. S. GLASSCOCK, Kansas City, Kan. THE EDUCATIONAL STATUS OF MEDI- New York City with her 4,000,000 popu- lation is honored with more than 18,181 lawyers or one lawyer to every 220 persons, including men, women and children. This number is augmented by an annual addition of about 3,500 more, the product of about 118 law schools with a student body of more than 20,000 members. The average income Kansas City, Mo., an active inland city with 248,000 people, has some 1200 legal representatives or about one lawyer to every 206 citizens. About 300 of the 1200, we are told, are members of the bar association, ranging personal damage suits against 300 bar members considerable business in Recently we asked a leading attorney why the bar association did not disqualify for unprofessional snitching and filing of irresponsible suits. His answer was a smile. Presently he said: "that would hurt the who bring in cases to your good surgeons who divide the fees. I believe you call it fee splitting. At any rate your lesser men are a business resource to your men higher WILL PHILANTHROPY STANDARDIZE THE PROFESSIONS? THE EVOLUTION OF MEDICAL EDUCATION; WHAT ABOUT THE LAW? Then you admit that the practice of law today has receded from the lofty plane of a profession to that of a business-shall I say a bread and butter commodity? "Yes, today that's true, its a business, but it was not true in the days of an ethical yesterday in law. Today there is one attorney for every 200 to 225 persons in the active cities as estimated for New York and Kansas City. With this disproportion between the supply and demand the day of waiting for business with lawful dignity and ethical reverence is a modus operandi of antiquity. It is a question of the survival of the man who shrewdly shapes a plaintive desire into a working hypothesis; of the man who scents it afar off, who, with impressive legal dexterity, and often, with much cunning, beats his colleague to it, from the viewpoint of a yearning commercial tomorrow. This is a day of hysterical frenzy, temporary madness, and commercial piracy; an atrophy of consience and a hypertrophy of an unreasoning and omnivorous craving. Nothing so agitates the inhumanity in man as does the emptiness of purse and stomach and the lawyer, in his multiplicity, has both. The hundreds of law suits having no real standing in law and, therefore, are lawsuits in name only, are largely only greedy desires for revenge or to get something for nothing, on the part of the plaintiff whose avarice yields a charitable donation to a lawyer of desk room reputation." This frank acknowledgement of a lawyer of ability and repute explains the injustice to many of our medical men who are made defendants in suits that savor of black mail. For instance, a punctured flesh wound, external to and above the external condyle of the humerus, healed promptly and the patient was discharged with a perfect arm. Later the ulnar nerve distribution gradually became paralytic due to a secondary cicatrical injury. A suit was filed and judgment given for $4,000. Still later when the physician rendered his bill the patient sued him for $7,500. The suit is pending. Another physician examined the eye of a charity patient for which his assistant had temporarily given palliative treatment. The doctor said the eye could not be saved and gave no treatment. Later a suit was filed, alleging a destroyed eye and a judgment of $10,000 is now in the Supreme Court. Another physician remarked that a child was an abandoned child." When ques. tioned about it, he is said to have said that the statement was made by the attending physician with whom he was called in counsel. A suit was promptly filed against the latter and a judgment given. Again a physician, one of a private car party, is made a defendant by a stranger who is said to have been prevented from forcibly entering the car where he was an intruder. A physician was sued because the family laundress stuck a pin in her hand while washing the clothes. A judgment of $2,000 was rendered. A well known physician attended a confinement for which he was never paid. A few years later the child fractured the femur. The doctor set it and got good union without shortening. Later as the boy grew the fractured leg did not grow and in time shortening was apparent. Though the doctor did this family practice for twenty years without receiving a cent, a suit for $20,000 was brought against him because the injury damaged the nutrient supply and prevented a natural growth of the limb. October 21, 1913, on hearing the plaintiff's evidence, the judge ordered a verdict for the defendants, Drs. Claude Thompson, of Muskogee, and A. J. Snelson, of Checotah, Okla. In this case a fellow physician, an ex-president of the State Medical Association, is said to have posed as an expert witness against the doctors. Its unfortunate that the county society does not stringently discourage an active or passive aiding or abetting of malpractice suits against its members by its members, by handling the aider without gloves. An example of this particular nefariousness is the taking of a $5,000 fee for filing a suit (not prosecuting the suit) from a lunatic claiming false detention, though detained only under his guardianship, and for a claimed X-ray burn, which is a cancer and not an X-ray burn, the allegation being contrary to facts as the party sued never administered to said lunatic any kind of an electric current at any time. Those instrumental in bringing the suit were aware of the falsity of the claim, the motive being the filing fee and to remotely damage the defendant's business. Last, but not least are the two suits of S.G.B. $100,000 each against our A. M. A. Journal ist, the prosecutor of misinterpreted facts. because it dared to publish the irregular status of Friedmannism under certain promotors. The motive is apparent. With a noble profession reduced in its collateral to brazen trickery, to a pernicious pestilence in manufacturing litigation, many end results of which from any other viewpoint would be little less than gross legal transgression, what is the remedy? One lawyer to an average of 213 people. Two-thirds of those are women and children, leaving 71 men to be pursued. Two-thirds of the 71 men would be worthless financial picking, thus leaving about 24 men off of whom the lawyer must live. Again what is the remedy? What was the remedy in medicine when it was shown there was one physician to 800 population? Why not the same standardization of the legal profession? The Kansas City School of Law with an annual student body of about 300 men makes lawyers out of them in three annual sessions of about 36 weeks each. "The total class room attendance required for each student is twelve hours per week." This means 432 class room" hours per year, or 1296 class room" hours for three years or 162 days of eight hours each to graduate a lawyer as compared with 4,000 hours or 500 days of eight hours each in the four-year course of medicine, or 5,000 hours or 625 days of eight hours each in the fiveyear course to graduate a physician, exclusive of hospital service. The law school admits students who are graduates of a college, an academy, a high school or matriculates of a college. "Those who cannot produce evidence of a general education may be examined. . under direction of the faculty of this school." "Applicants may be admitted conditionally, notwithstanding they may be deficient in some subjects." In medicine no makeshift entrance credentials are acceptable today. Beginning January, 1914, an accredited high school graduation, plus two years of collegiate work, is demanded by the Association of American Medical Colleges. Will organized philanthropy throw on the intellectual search-light and restore the dispensation of the law to the dignity of a profession and eugenically stop the breed of the chevalier d'industrie, living a chronique scandaleuse in the name of the law. In the meantime every ethical physician should earnestly lend his support to the medical defense fund that the medical association as a power may discourage malpracticeblack-mail till it ceases to attract the vermicular word artist, the verbal contortion RADIUM AND ITS SUPPLY. Persons who have used radium and come to appreciate its great value in surgery are interested to know whether it will ever come into common use or not. In January, 1913, the price in Germany was $105 per milligram. In April it sold in New York for $90 per milligram, and in July at Vienna for $50. This great difference in price is owing to the use of another mineral called mesothorium which is found to be a very good substitute for radium, and a mineral in which radium is very closely mixed. It is found that there are a great many radium bearing ores in the United States. Assayists in Colorado have found that carnotite will produce a great mass of uranium, which in turn will yield a large amount of radium. Thus eight million pounds of uranium will yield nine hundred grams of radium, and this is equivalent to about four pounds of pure radium bromide. There are mines in Colorado where radium is found in grains of sandstone, and there is beginning to be a very active exploration to determine the presence of this metal. The great expense is to extract it. It is so infinitesimal, and the extraction process is so complicated, that it will be some time before it will be put on the market at a reasonable price. Today there is about six times more radium on the market than there was last year. Chemists are beginning to understand how to handle and control it. This is one of the new fields from which we must expect very marvelous advances in the near future. T.D.C. WOOD ALCOHOL. Permanent blindness and deaths have so frequently followed the inhalation of wood alcohol fumes, and the drinking of wood alcohol and products containing it, that the committee for the prevention of blindness in New York has undertaken to stop its miscellaneous use by legislation. A bill has been introduced at Albany providing for labeling of all products containing wood alcohol, as follows: "Poison: wood alcohol; do not use except where there is sufficient ventilation." The measure is backed also by the State Department of Labor. The permanent blindness of a number of men who have used varnishes BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH. For ages scientific men have studied the phenomena of life, and have marvelled at the mysteries surrounding death and the dissolution of the earthy body. Dr. Leonard Keene Hirschberg contributes an interesting article on this subject to Lippincott's for November, in which he says: "Recent experiments in the histological and physiclogical laboratories of the Johns Hopkins Medical School have produced many remarkable results which go to show that there is an intermediate stage between life and death. That life in many organisms may be suspended by freezing in liquid air, and by other processes resuscitated after weeks or even months, formed the basis of the theory of a Northern scientist that he could resuscitate the bodies of Captain Scott and his companions who reached the South Pole.. While this theory is not credited by scientists, it cannot be doubted that the process is really being accomplished on a much smaller scale here. "An inspection of the laboratories where these experiments are being daily repeated brings to light accomplishments of which the general public seldom dreams. Laymen at once think of the breathing organism, with its beating heart and its perceptions of the outer world, in contrast to the cold, rigid, unconscious form in which the pulsations of the heart have ceased forever. But, as is proven during an inspection of these laboratories and their specimens, there may exist, either theoretically or actually, in these apparently dead organisms, phases of depressed vitality so closely resembling death as to be indistinguishable from it. "There is a state known as 'latent life,' for the organism, having enormous powers of resisting conditions that tend to death. Bacteria of various diseases are seen in the laboratory, frozen at a temperature of liquid air, of 260 degrees Fahrenheit. They do not die, as a rule, and often survive so ex tremely drastic a procedure as this and retain their specific vital pathogenic characteristics. "There are instances where such coldblooded animals as frogs and rats, snails and fish, have their lives suspended by this freezing process, sometimes so thoroughly that their intestines can be taken out en masse, and yet on being 'thawed out' after a period of weeks revive most actively. These animals are perfectly normal when placed in a refrigerating jar just large enough to hold one animal. The jar is filled with liquid air at a certain temperature, and after a short time the animals appear lifeless. A month later they are re-. moved, and on being massaged show signs of life. "In the warm-blooded animals, even man himself, one does not find such instances of suppression of vitality as in the case of lower organisms, creatures with more sluggish and therefore less easily deranged metabolism. The interesting inference from all these cases of latent life or suspended animation is that, though vitality cannot be said to have vanished, yet the organism during all that time is not taking food, oxygen, or water, it is not giving out carbon dioxide or water or other chemical results of life. It is not moving of its own volition, and in the higher animals both the cardiac and respiratory activities are in abeyance. "Recently some very interesting and successful efforts were made in the medical school to revive the apparently dead heart of an animal. In about five cases out of ten the heart of a chicken took on renewed energy several hours after death. Immediately after death the heart was frozen and preserved. A few hours later it was resuscitated by massage. "From these experiments no claim is made that after death life can be restored, but in many instances in which life is thought to be extinct it is only masked, and it remains for the scientist to discover through experiment whether they are dealing with death itself or with latent life." LIFE AND THE MEDICAL PROFESSION. "Life," a New York publication, containing alleged humor, some clever cartoons, and an occasional jibe at those who practice regular medicine, devotes an entire column in a recent issue to the Medical Society of the Missouri Valley. Being convinced that very few doctors enjoy "Life" (in its printed form we take the liberty of quoting in full the article referred to, al |