quantities, under conditions that insure cleanliness whether the breast
or the bottle is used. Perhaps some day no girl will be given a
graduating certificate, or a license for work, teaching, or marriage,
until she has demonstrated her ability to give some mother's baby
"clean air, clean body, clean milk."

FOOTNOTES:

[15] Libraries should obtain all reports on milk, Bureau of Animal
Industry, Washington, D.C.

CHAPTER XXVI

PREVENTIVE "HUMANIZED" MEDICINE: PHYSICIAN AND TEACHER

No profession, excepting possibly the ministry, is regarded with
greater deference than the medical profession. Our ancestors listened
with awe and obedience to the warnings and behests of the medicine man,
bloodletter, bonesetter, family doctor. In modern times doctors have
disagreed with each other often enough to warrant laymen in questioning
the infallibility of any individual healer or any sect, whether
homeopath, allopath, eclectic, osteopath, or scientist. Yet to this day
most of us surround the medical profession or the healing art with an
atmosphere of necromancy. Even after we have given up faith in drugs or
after belief is denied in the reality of disease and pain, we revere
the calling that concerns itself, whether gratuitously or for pay, with
conquering bodily ills.

Self-laudation continues this hold of the medical profession upon the
lay imagination. One physician may challenge another's faults, ridicule
his remedies, call his antitoxin dangerous poison, but their common
profession he proudly styles "the most exalted form of altruism." Young
men and women beginning the study or the practice of medicine are
exhorted to continue its traditions of self-denial, and in their very
souls to place human welfare before personal or pecuniary advancement.
Newspapers repeat exhortation and laudation. We laymen pass on the
story that we know is not universally true,--physicians know,
physicians apply what they know without consciousness of error,
physicians must be implicitly trusted.

For a physician to give poison when he means to give food is worse, not
better, than for a layman to make the same mistake. Neither the moral
code nor the law of self-preservation enjoins a tuberculous mother to
take alcohol or to sleep in an unventilated room, even if an uninformed
physician prescribes it. Instruction in physiology and hygiene would be
futile if those who are educated as to the elementary facts of hygiene
and physiology mus