Thrashing

The Palmer House elevator (in Chicago) stopped at the fourth floor. The doors slid aside and a group of doctors walked in. They were members of Federation of State Medical Boards and of the Council on Education, Licensure and Hospitals of the American Medical Association. Their business was serious; they murmured busily. The elevator remained at the fourth floor.

"You can't ride in these elevators. You will have to step out." The elevator attendant was talking to one of the doctors--Dr. A. G. Fairfax, Negro, of Chicago. Dr. Fairfax skilled to discountenance indignities, replied: "I am standing here on my two feet--and here I stay!" His white colleagues murmured sympathetically; and dumbfounded the elevatorman carried the group to the lobby on the ground floor. Later he explained: "I did not know the colored man was a doctor. My orders from the desk are to allow no colored man to ride in the elevators unless he is with a white man who will say: 'He is with me.'

Thereafter, during their meetings, doctors rode up and down Palmer House elevators without let. Attendants who padded outside the hotel's Red Lacquer Room where the doctors met, might have been scandalized by the medical damnation that sounded through the doors. They knew that some of the conferring doctors were famed--Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, President of Stanford University, Dr. William James Mayo, of Rochester, Minn. They did not know that the emphatic doctors were enjoying themselves, giving a sound thrashing to other members of their profession. The doctors knew that their advice was good; they knew too that it would be followed, as a levee laborer follows a hand truck, lethargically. Theoretically, in the medical profession, a doctor is an enterprising individual; practically he is a follower of group thought. It takes strong shouting to start a professional group towards action. The doctors at Chicago spoke vigorously.

Schooling. "For the most part the medical curriculum is static, rigid and shot full of antique methods, ideas and procedures. It often misguides individuals into the belief that they have completed their education when they have wandered successfully through its intricacies and mazes. It is difficult to train a man or woman to work largely with his hands and senses in the care of the sick when he has been brought up in the present pass-the-buck atmosphere of the ordinary hospital mechanism for the diagnosis and care of the sick. The more work done by the student and the less by the teacher, the better the product. It is not what we know but what we actually use that counts in medical practice. Don't measure education in the terms of talk. Get that."-- Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, president of Stanford University.

Purpose. "Today one can truthfully say that medical researches designed to relieve generations yet unborn are looked upon as being almost holy, whereas the relief of people who are now miserable and suffering is, too often, looked on as rather sordid and commercial. Today we are suffering from too much knowledge too widely diffused. We devote too much effort to driving home detailed information and too little to the development of perspective."--Dr. William James Mayo, Rochester, Minn.

Cost. "The present cost of medical education, the number of years before men can be selfsupporting, and the age at which students graduate, averaging around 27, are driving many bright men into other professions."--Dr. Mayo.

Fees. "The medical man who deceives his patient by some scheme of division of fees might just as well pick his patient's pockets. This [such evils] should be attacked without any sensationalism, and certainly without any publicity."-- Dr. Arthur Dean Sevan, Chicago.

Clannishness. ". . . Conscienceless physicians who conceal unethical or criminal methods of practice behind a few ethical physicians on the staff who ignore, whether purposefully or not, the other members' misdeeds."--Dr. Nathan Porter Colwell, Chicago.

Whiskey. "More than 99 prescriptions out of 100 written for a pint of whiskey are bootlegging prescriptions and are a disgrace to the great medical profession."--Dr. Bevan.

Quacks. "The vampires and pirates of quackery are bleeding the people. They are capitalizing the lack of discrimination of the average simple person as to what constitutes a qualified practitioner, and in many cases their activities prove fatal."--Dr. Arthur Thomas McCormack, Louisville.

Standards. "The single standard and the examinations [by all state medical boards] under it would make it necessary for all practitioners to have at least some education in biology, anatomy physiology, hygiene and diagnosis. This would reduce the peril to life of wrong diagnosis, with consequent wrong treatment, sometimes ending in death.--Dr. Willard C. Rappleye, New Haven.

Hope. "Inasmuch as during the last 50 years the life of the individual, on the average, has been extended from 40 to 58 years, what can be expected within the next 50 years with the more extensive and concerted efforts towards the prevention of disease and an improved physical development of the public?"--Dr. Colwell.

When Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, President of Stanford University happens near Washington, D. C., he hastens to No. 1712 19th Street N. W. His brother lives there; and his brother, Curtis Dwight Wilbur, is U. S. Secretary of the Navy. When the Secretary was the unpresumptuous, scholarly Chief Justice of California (before President Coolidge drew him to be the naive Secretary), University President Wilbur enjoyed many a tasty meal at the Justice's California home. Mrs. Wilbur cooked the meals herself then. She likes to cook; and although she has as yet made no recipe famed, like Mrs. Coolidge's coffee souffle, (TIME, Feb. 14), her coffee cake, whiffed from the oven, is tantalizing.

Few doctors have abandoned their profession to become famed in other fields. Dr. Georges Clemenceau became a War leader of France; Dr. Leonard Wood is Governor General of the Philippines; Dr. Hubert Work, U. S. Secretary of the Interior; Dr. Royal Samuel Copeland, U. S. Senator from New York.* Dr. John T. Dorrance (see p. 18) entered business (Campbell Soup); Dr. Attilio H. Giannini is president of the East River National Bank, New York (see p. 28). Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle and Dr. Arthur Schnitzler are unequivocally authors, whereas Dr. Joseph Collins and Dr. Richard Cabot make authorship complementary to medicine.* Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur quit medicine to take up the social chores that President Emeritus David Starr Jordan (also a graduate physician) began, and Dr. John Casper Branner carried on until his resignation in 1916.

Being president of Stanford University requires potency in human affairs. Dr. Wilbur took the president's chair in 1916. He immediately busied himself--U. S. Food Administration, California Council of Defense. . . . When Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding was yet candidate for the U. S. Presidency, Dr. Wilbur supported him publicly. At President Harding's death, Dr. Wilbur, with Dr. Charles Miner Cooper, performed the autopsy and prepared the statement of his physical condition "as it affected his last illness and his sudden death in 1923." At that time Dr. Wilbur was President of the American Medical Association, a potent position during a presidential campaign year. He might have had a Cabinet appointment himself. But for him, the continued chieftainship of a university is more notable than the term occupancy of a U. S. Department. So Dr. Wilbur was without handicap when two years ago he led the U. S. group to the Institute of Pacific Relations, the first successful attempt to mobilize pan-Pacific thought in international affairs. In fine, Dr. Wilbur has definitely turned from medicine; has deliberately made Aesculapius his handman.

In adolescence Ray Lyman Wilbur was distinguished. He was, and still is, taller than his tall brother. Curtis Dwight Wilbur is 6 ft. 3 in.

*Dr. Henrik Shipstead, U. S. Senator from Minnesota, is a dentist.

*Authors Oliver Wendell Holmes, Eugene Sue, Victorien Sardou, Tobias Smollett, Dr. David Ramsay, were first doctors ; and Dr. Benjamin Rush was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.