Quacks Quashed

Frank P. Blair, Chicago diver, last week adjusted his helmet, slowly submerged himself in Lake Michigan. With careful, heavy movements he prowled around the bottom, searched through jumbled cans, tires, bottles. Diver Blair is a good searcher. He it was who recovered from the muddy Jackson Park Lagoon the typewriter which helped incriminate Murderers Leopold and Loeb in 1924. When he emerged last week, he brought up two heavy objects. They were counterfeit seals of the University of Chicago and Northwestern University.

In possession of the seals, State authorities moved to finish a case on which they had labored long. They held eight men under indictment for selling forged medical degrees and Illinois medical licenses. Citizens of the State were not surprised to learn that the accused ringleader was W. H. H. Miller who, for irregularities in issuing doctors' licenses, had been ousted in 1922 as head of the State Department of registration and education.

The facts of the case disclosed the working methods of the group who had been making a fortune out of what they termed "the medico-dental racket." They sold forged licenses and diplomas for fraud "doctors" to hang on their office walls at an average price of $2,000. They also supplied college credit credentials to "students."

Although such forged documents enabled purchasers to start practicing in Illinois at once, the more clever ones pursued another method. Going to a neighboring State they would show the forged Illinois license and college diploma, ask for a license from that State, which would be issued perfunctorily. Soon they would return to Illinois, show the license from the neighboring State; demand a complementary one from Illinois. This method, while devious, enabled them to obtain legitimate licenses difficult to trace to their spurious source.

Legitimate doctors and frightened patients in Illinois have asked for an immediate investigation into all medical licenses and diplomas. Authorities pointed out that because the forged diplomas were from many a college besides Chicago and Northwestern, to weed out all quacks would be almost impossible. Nevertheless, Diver Blair was sent on another search, at a certain spot on the bottom of Chicago's drainage canal, where the forgers confessed having thrown their spurious engraving plates.

In Illinois the maximum prison penalty is one year for administering medicine without a license, one year for representing oneself falsely as a graduate physician.