A few months ago we noticed a book entitled, St. Bernards: The Romance of a Medical Student, in which the morality of hospital life and practice is shown in a very unenviable light. The author of this work, who writes under the nom de plume of AEsculapius Scalpel, naturally came in for some very strong criticism at the hands of his medical brethren. To these strictures he replies by writing another book, which he entitles Dying Scientifically. In this work there is no romance. The writer had said that all his strictures in St. Bernards were under the mark rather than over it, and that he was prepared to prove it. Dying Scientifically provides the proof. From works that are open to all readers, and from the journals of the day, he makes his quotations, and shows beyond contradiction that there is something radically wrong with the tone and principles of medical teaching and practice in hospitals.
It will be remembered that a stir was made some few years ago by the publication in The Lancet of a series of experiments with Nitrate of Sodium on hospital patients by two London physicians. One of their defenders, himself a hospital physician, boldly claimed the right of doctors to experiment on their patients, to use them otherwise than for treatment. And a writer in The Standard at the time quotes from Dr. Ringers book where he says that he used a drunkard to test the effect of alcohol on the temperature of the body, making him dead drunk with fifteen ounces of pure brandy at a single dose; and, further, he quotes from Dr. Ringer:
In a boy, aged ten, who had never in his life before taken alcohol in any form, I found, through a large number of observations, a constant and decided reduction of temperature.
In the eyes of this physician the manufacture of juvenile drunkards and the confirmation of old ones is nothing to be compared with the advancement of science. AEsculapius Scalpel shows by other quotations that many a patient has been made to die scientifically who might have been still living if the pursuit of science had not been inexorable.:
It may be, and no doubt ought to be, very consoling to patient to feel that the interests of science were being furthered by his death; but, after all, it is for the cure of patients, and not, in the first instance, for the advancement of science, that doctors exist. There is nothing worse for the profession than that the scientific spirit should prevail over its humanity. Our profession is a noble one -- but only when it is lived up to AEsculapius Scalpel shows that in hospitals and among medical teachers the scientific spirit takes the lead, and that its effects are disastrous. The passion for experiment fostered in the physiological laboratory on frogs and other animals does not expend itself there. Dying Scientifically is an exposure of this weak side of our profession of which it stands in much need.
--The Homoeopathic World, Volume 23