Quacks, false remedies and the public health / [David Walsh].

  • Walsh, David
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Quacks, false remedies and the public health / [David Walsh]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    8 fession and the public that the General Medical Council should take steps to secure authoritative rulings of Section XL. of the Medical Act, 1858, and, finally, to use their great influence, to which they are by their high position justly entitled, with the Legis- lature, in order to obtain a short Act establishing remedies against illegal medical practice before courts of summary jurisdiction. The foregoing remarks and suggestions, be it said, are submitted with all diffidence, and with a full sense of the pitfalls that await the technically unlearned investigator who attempts to thread the mazes of a legal history extending over nearly 400 years. ELECTIVE REPRESENTATIVE MEMBERS OF ALL CoOR- PORATIONS ON GENERAL MEDICAL COUNCIL. Parliament, however, in search for a method of revivifying the General Medical College and the quali- fying bodies of the United Kingdom, could effect that purpose by a stroke of the pen. The constitution of the Council is for the most part that of the non-repre- sentative nominees of the constituent corporation. There is nothing in the Act to show how those repre- sentatives were to be chosen. Parliament or the Privy Council, or the General Medical Council itself, have simply to decide that in future the representative of every qualifying body upon the Council shall be elected by their respectiev graduates or diplomates. As regards the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the government is in the hands of the Councils and Fellows, to the exclusion of the lower ranks of diplo- mates, namely, the licentiates, and in some instances the members. As the Colleges draw the bulk of their revenue from the lower ranks, it follows that the exclusion of the latter from any part in the govern- ment of the colleges runs counter to the modern demo- cratic view that those who contribute income should have a voice in its expenditure. Far as the cry may seem, it is not unlikely that the autocratic and largely irresponsible government of the Colleges has a direct relation to the prevalence of quackery. Had the qualifying corporations been governed by the rank and file of the medical profes- sion, and had the majority of the Council been repre- sentative of medical practitioners generally, instead of the corporations, they would long ago have con- trived to deal with the blatant evils arising to the public from the practice of quackery. Surely the legislative wisdom of the nation can cope with an evil which was emphatically denounced and legislated against 400 years ago.