Medicine: Surgeons' College

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"Today it may be said that we are dying as individuals and not in droves. The world, through science, has been made a safe place in which to live. All the mass destroying diseases have largely come under control, and now each adult must fight his own individual battle. Usually he does not brook any interference with his own mode of living."

Dabbles in the Occult, Dr. Charles Horace Mayo would "rather die when my brain fails than live on." His brother William James Mayo has a more vigorous contempt for addled minds. To flay students of the psychic, he wrote:

"Anyone dabbling in the occult, deliberately depriving himself of vision, man's chief means of obtaining information, injures himself mentally. I have known a number of men of great promise in medicine, who, in the springtime of their lives, became interested in a cult or in occultism of the old-fashioned spiritualistic type, which led them to blind alleys.

"Sir Conan Doyle, Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge are three outstanding men of science who interested themselves in psychic phenomena and believed in reincarnation of the dead. This interest, however, came in the autumn of an intense scientific life. Their great days were over."

Body's "Power Station." Preoccupation with mental and nervous phenomena pervaded the surgeons' meeting. Many diseases which require knifing result from disordered nerves. But surgery may improve many nervous disorders. Dr. George Washington Crile has concentrated lately on the adrenal glands and their body influence. He considers the adrenals the "power station" of the sympathetic nervous system, the frontal lobe of the brain as the "slave driver." When the adrenals are over-busy they cause abnormal nervous excitation, abnormal palpitation of the heart ("soldiers' heart"), abnormal nervous fatigue, peptic ulcer, etc., etc. Dr. Crile is curing such ailments, he said, by disconnecting the adrenals' nerves, thus interrupting their powerful body control.

Social Medicine. The Congress proceedings began with an attack on State control of Medicine. Retiring President Miller instanced as a horrid example of such control the often poorly trained, politically ruled doctors who have jobs as coroners and health commissioners. The Congress ended with President James Rowland Angell of Yale declaring: "I am by no means unaware of the narrow-minded and exclusively self-seeking attitude of a good many practitioners who see in every social movement affecting medicine simply one more effort to rob them of a livelihood and forthwith devote all their energies to digging in where they are. Their position is like that of Labor, which has traditionally opposed all labor-saving machinery—and always in the long run, in vain. . . .

"[A new social] philosophy conceives the social order as under binding obligation to give its members wholesome conditions of life, protection from needless exposure, whether to climate or disease or moral depravity. It conceives human life as indisputably superior to money or physical property in any form, and it is disposed to suppress or radically modify any agency to practice which appears to be exploiting men for the promotion of merely financial and material gain."