Medicine Man McCann

Alfred W. McCann was for years medicine man of The New York Globe. Frank Munsey bought the Globe, sunk it into his Sun, and Mr. McCann joined The Mail. Before the first week of the New Year was up, he had picked a fight with the entire medical profession. His battlefield is tuberculosis of the lungs.

There exists a "lime starvation" treatment, which consists of getting organic lime into the blood. Mr. McCann asserts that the customary sanatorium treatment arrests only 22% of tuberculosis cases, taken at early stages, and treated under ideal conditions, whereas, for 12 years, the "lime starvation" cure has arrested an average of 68%, taken at serious stages, and treated while patients continued to do their regular work. Mr. McCann asserts that the suppression of this cure reveals "the abysmal inertia of the medical profession with respect to a disease so clumsily and inefficiently attacked."

He supports his charges by two quotations--one from Dr. John F. Murphy, in whose memory a hospital is being built in Chicago: "In fact it [outrageously neglected treatment of tuberculosis] borders on a crime." The other quotation is from Dr. Richard C. Cabot, Harvard: "I know from my own certain knowledge that the vast majority of physicians in Massachusetts cannot make a diagnosis of early tuberculosis. I do not believe that one-tenth of the physicians in any State can tell incipient tuberculosis when they see it from physicial signs."

Mr. McCann concludes that the obstructionist tactics of the American Medical Association keep 10,000,000 American sufferers from hope of recovery. This is a statement that may be characterized as fantastic.