CHAUVINISM IN MEDICINE

Abstract

The doctor's intellectual independence may keep the practitioner out of the clutches of the arch-enemy of his professional independence—the pernicious literature of our camp-followers, a literature increasing in bulk, in meretricious attractiveness, and in inpudent audacity. To modern pharmacy we owe much . . . but the profession has no more insidious foe than the large pharmaceutical houses. We all know only too well the bastard literature which floods the mail, every page of which illustrates the truth of the axiom, the greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism. Much of it is advertisements of nostrums foisted on the profession by men who trade on the innocent credulity of the regular physician. . . . No class of men with which we have to deal illustrates more fully that greatest of ignorance which is the conceit that a man knows what he does not know.