In Texas

The great body of respectable medical practitioners, the allopaths (as distinguished from the promoters of all sorts of strange and often quack cures and methods), have it as one of the strictest items of their code of ethics that they will not advertise their services in the public press or by any other commercial means. Any doctor who does so is regarded by them as beyond the pale, probably a quack.

But possibly this code of ethics may be modified, if one may judge by the recent action of the Texas State Medical Association. True, the doctors of the great respectable group are never likely to adventure into the public prints each individually boasting of his marvelous powers and miraculous cures. But the Texas State Medical Association created a committee to devise dignified and effective means for advertising for the great body of allopathic physicians. This committee passed resolutions urging county Medical Associations 1) to publish advertisements in local papers of educational nature advising people how to get proper treatment for diseases and avoid false cures, and 2) to publish from time to time in these papers lists of the members of the county Medical Associations, so that the public might know what doctors in their opinion were properly qualified to give adequate treatment to patients.

The President of the Texas Medical Association, Dr. C. M. Rosser, went before the Texas Press Association in convention and explained the new course adopted by the doctors.

One of the first fruits of the new policy was the appropriation of $25,000 for this type of advertising by the Dallas County Medical Association, planning to insert each week a half-page advertisement in each of the four daily newspapers of Dallas. Three of the four newspapers have also announced their intention, by way of cooeperation, of not accepting any further advertisements from unlicensed doctors.