THE LAW AND THE DOCTOR.

BY J. W. JERVEY, M.D. in Chicago Clinic.

The Money Value of a Woman's Life.Legal decisions tend to show that a woman's life is worth but half that of a man. Five thousand dollars has often been decided upon as the value of a man's life, as many decisions of the court show, while the judgments recently allowed in two separate states, for damages for the deaths of women, amounted to $2,500 each. The Supreme Court of Maine reduced a judgment for $3,500 to $2,500, claiming that the former sum was too large to pay for the death of a woman who had only supported her husband and five children. The Supreme Court of New Jersey also reduced a verdict for $5,000 for a woman's life lately to $2.500. It is truly an odd view of life that is gained from the court room.-Philadelphia Med. Journal.

A decision in regard to the right of the state to pass laws requiring the vaccination of children as a condition of their attending the public schools has been made recently in the state of Pennsylvania.

The father of a child that was denied admission to the public school on account of not being vaccinated in accordance with the rules of the Board of Education and an act of the Legislature brought a mandamus suit in the city of Philadelphia. The Court of Common Pleas maintained the right of the Board of Education to demand such vaccination, and, on appeal, the Supreme Court sustained the ruling of the lower court in the following terms: "We think that the court below did not err in the ruling referred to." In the case, Duffield versus Williamsport School District, we hold that school directors in the exercise of a sound discretion may exclude from the public schools pupils who have not been vaccinated.

An Important Ruling Concerning a Physician's Fees.-A very important ruling was made by Judge Armstrong, at Camden, N.

J., on August 2. Dr. Godfrey, who had attended a woman for four years, put in his claim as a preferred creditor for $349 against her estate, after her decease. It appears that the patient had been suffering from Bright's disease, and, while under Dr. Godfrey's care, had been recommended by him to go to Bedford Springs, where she died. While she was there, another physician attended her. The claim was made by the defendant estate that not Dr. Godfrey but this other physician, who was called in at the last, attended the patient in her last illness, and that, therefore, Dr. Godfrey had no locus standi as a preferred creditor. In this point of view the court, very properly as it seems to us, declined to concur, but ruled, on the contrary, that Dr. Godfrey did attend the woman in her last illness. It seems to us to be clear that as the attendance was continuous over the period of the illness which ended fatally, until the patient, at Dr. Godfrey's advice, went to Bedford Springs; her being there was in fact part of the treatment prescribed by him; and, unless it could be shown that the patient had actually dismissed him after going there, it must reasonably be assumed that she continued to carry out his treatment in general, notwithstanding the presence of another physician, whose attendance should be regarded in the light of auxiliary aid in an emergency, much as would be the case were the nearest physician, say, in an attack of hemoptysis, when the doctor under whose continued care a tuberculous patient was, did not happen to be at home. Surely both physicians in such a case would be properly held to have been in attendance during the last illness.

Rich Patient Must Pay Well.-One hundred dollars a day is a moderate physician's charge when attending a millionaire, according to expert witnesses in the Orphans' Court to-day. Dr. J. O. Flower had filed suit against the estate of the late H. M. Curry for $5,243 for professional services. Mr. Curry was one of the Carnegie Steel Co. partners and died two years ago. Dr.

Flower's services covered five months and a

trip to Atlantic City of twenty-one days, at which resort Mr. Curry died. Dr. Flower claimed that he treated Mr. Curry so successfully that his life was prolonged sufficiently to enable him to add at least $1,000,000 to his fortune, the estate being worth about $6,000,000 when he died. Dr. Flower's bill is made up of visits to Mr. Curry's home and the cost of the trip at Atlantic City. For his visits to his residence he charges $25 a visit and $100 at Atlantic. City. All the experts agreed that this was not exorbitant.

Board of Education Sustained. The right to exclude from the public schools any pupil who has been ill, until passed upon by the regular medical inspector of the Board of Education, was sustained in a decision handed down by Judge Ball in the Superior Court at Chicago recently. The opinion was given after the hearing of a petition for a writ of mandamus against the School Board to allow a pupil to return to her classes without first having passed a medical examination.

Common Law Rights and the Physician's Prescription. Since prescriptions are not protected by copyright it is essential that a physician should know just what his and the druggist's rights are as established by common law touching a prescription in the hands of the latter. The law gives a druggist the legal right to use any medical formula, not copyrighted, as often as he pleases, provided it contains no intoxicants or other poisons, which require a physician's order for dispensing. On the other hand, the druggist has no legal right to allow the physician's name to remain on the container after refilling, or to use that name in any connection whatever with the refilled formula except by the express wish or consent of the physician. The refilling then, is done (when without the physician's order) solely on the pharmacist's own responsibility. Furthermore, it has been settled by the courts:

1. The patient has no legal or other right

to demand a written prescription or written directions from the physician.

2. It is right and wise that the druggist demand and procure from the physician his written orders for the compounding of prescriptions.

3. The physician has the undoubted right to designate what pharmacist shall fill his prescription.

4. The written prescription is simply an order from physician to pharmacist. It is, through courtesy and by virtue of custom and convenience, handed to the patient for transmission, but the latter has not, at any time, the slightest right of possession in the instrument.

5. The druggist has at least the right of permanent guardianship (perhaps of outright possession of the prescription, and he must file it for reference and for any form of proper investigation.

6. There can be no right, extenuation or excuse for a copy of a prescription, with physician's name attached, to be taken by druggist, patient or anyone else without the authority of the physician.

7. The careful physician should invariably retain a carbon-paper fac-simile copy of every prescription he writes.

8. If a druggist refills a prescription without the order of the physician who wrote it, he does so on his own responsibility, and he has no legal or moral right to leave or place the physician's name on the container.

LESS WORK FOR THE DOCTORS.

FAR more important and encouraging as "signs of the times" than any developments in politics or industry are the advertisements of physical culture systems and health foods and other means for promoting a sound body. The enormous increase in this kind of advertising within the past five years means a sudden enormous increase in intelligent public interest in health.

And that means oncoming generations with purer, stronger blood and therefore with clearer, more active, more courageous brains. And that, in turn, means that all the problems of living, personal, social, political, will be met and taken care of.

Some one once said that the peoples of Asia were enslaved because they did not know how to say "No." But back of this vacillation lay poor health-the universal Asiatic complaint, due to a universal neglect of health, mitigated though it was by the sanitary regulations imposed under the guise of religious ordinances. No physically robust people was ever enslaved or was ever retrogressive. The first warning of the downfall of the Roman Empire before the hardier Northern races was the wretched throngs of weaklings in in the pestilencehaunted cities of the Mediterranean.

Heretofore in the world's history civilization has meant decay, because it has meant taking a nation's best from the healthful open-air toil of the country and decaying and degenerating it in noisome cities where the very ideals of happiness involved destruction of health.

And our civilization of overabundant food, of exercise-ending street cars, and of all manner of muscle-saving and therefore muscle-decaying machinery would have meant speedy ruin to us of the modern world had it not been for the progress of sanitary science and of interest in things sanitary.

The first fruit of this progress has been the doctrine of the relative importance of drugs and the passing of the "family doctor"-two developments that are so rapid that we hardly appreciate them as yet. The other day Sir William Treves, the eminent English surgeon, announced what England seemed to regard as an amazing discovery, that pain is not an evil, but a good-a friendly sentinel rousing the garrison to repel the invader, disease.

It is a grand advance that we have made in discovering that the body does not wish to get sick, does not accidentally get sick, but on the contrary wishes to stay well, and

will stay well if its owner is not ignorant or reckless. This discovery will make two great changes in our system of education.

The first will be the teaching of breathing. To breathe properly means health, long life, capacity for work. Yet to-day how many people know how to breathe, have learned how to supplement nature's somewhat clumsy device for carrying on the breathing function automatically? How many people, of the millions who are anxious that their children should learn spelling and reading and ciphering and manners, give a thought to their children's learning to breathe?

The second great educational change will be the matter of diet. In this country and in nearly all of Europe except France we are still eating the things our forefathers managed to digest when they were toiling and sweating terribly in the open air.

Nature made the appetite for food keen because she had to deal with conditions in which the food supply was short and hard to reach, and if the appetite had not been keen, the animal would have easily given over the struggle. We ignore the changed conditions and use nature's no longer necessary bait as an excuse for stuffing ourselves three times a day and eating between meals. If it wern't that sanitation is much better nowdays, and cooking also, the consequences would be even severer than they As it is we suffer a great deal from "overwork" and "nervous prostration," don't we?

are.

It is pleasant to eat to satiation. It is comfortable to take no exercise and breathe lazily in one corner of the lungs. But it isn't the way to be long-lived and healthy. And it is the way to let the other fellow who breathes and exercises and eats properly, distance us. Hence the growth of interest in health and the decline of interest in drugs and doctors.-Saturday Evening Post.

EGYPTIAN MEN AND WOMEN.

From The Nineteenth Century.

IN face the men and women were very much alike, but there is a subtle charm about the female faces that is replaced by a placid dignity in the male. In both the features are delicate and of a somewhat aquiline type, and the figures are tall and slight. There is very little indication of muscle, but the men are broad shouldered and thin flanked, while the women, in spite of their stiff attitudes, are graceful and refined. In both the forms are soft and rounded. The resemblance between the men and the women is, of course, increased by the men being always cleanshaven.

In the paintings and bas reliefs there are certain conventions which do not apply to the statues, and for these due allowance has to be made.

In early times, all drawing and painting on the flat (and bas relief is but a form of this) had to serve two purposes. One was to convey information, the other to be ornamental. It is doubtful which is the earlier of the two. The man of the Stone Age, when he scratched his realistic mammoth on a piece of reindeer bone, either wanted to convey to his brother man that he had seen a fine specimen of this interesting animal, or else he did it because he thought it pretty, or he may have had both motives. In any case, we have here the common origin of art and writing.

The information picture dwindles down through hieroglyphics to mere symbols of sounds, the pictorial origin of which is entirely lost. The decorative picture gradually loses all wish to convey information, and subsists entirely for its pleasure to the eye. But the Egyptians had not got so far as that; when they drew a man, there had to be no mistake what it was. He had all to be displayed, as it were, to the best advantage. The legs were shown sideways, so as to give the whole length of the feet, and one leg was put in front of the other, so that neither should be concealed. Then

there came a difficulty about the body; if that were sideways, too, one shoulder would be lost; so the body must be seen frontways. The arms, again, are best seen sideways; fortunately, as both shoulders are shown, they do not interfere with one another. Again, a profile is more characteristic than a full face, but a profile eye is a poor, foreshortened thing. So in this profile we insert an eye seen to its full extent, and then we really have done the man justice. This eye, seen full face while the head is profile, gives naturally a peculiar expression, which makes people talk of the long, narrow eyes of the ancient Egyptians. They very likely had. nothing of the kind. Then, again, the twisting of the body makes the shoulders seem too broad. The ideal is certainly broad shouldered, but not so much so as this would make it appear.

THE

time, labor and money it may have cost him, is derogatory to a physician's dignity and a grave infraction of professional ethics. their incomes.

Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette

A Monthly Journal of Physiological Medicine

Contributions pertinent to the cbjects of the Magazine are invited.

Reprints of important papers supplied to authors when request for the same accompanies the MS.

Terseness and perspicuity will be considered cardinal

virtues.

It is assumed that original papers sent to the GAZETTE are not to be published elsewhere. If they are to be offered to other publications this fact must be stated by the author when sending his MS.

Matter designed for any particular month should reach the editor not later than the 10th of the preceding month. Advertisements may be handed in as late as the 20th. Requests for change of address should plainly state both the old and the new address.

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY, 1903

THE DOCTOR AND THE PATENT OFFICE.

THERE is an unwritten law against what is universally termed class legislation. Its object is to prevent the making and enforcing of laws or the granting of privileges that inure to the benefit of one trade or calling at the expense and to the detriment of some other, or of all other trades, callings, professions and vocations.

Notwithstanding this edict, the profession of medicine stands out as a notable exception. No other avocation is SO hampered by strained notions of propriety and fine-spun theories of what is held to be professional dignity. Thus the by-laws of most of the medical societies recite with great gravity, that "it is unbecoming to the dignity of any member of this society to"do what?

To advertise his business by any means whatever in the community in which he does business.

To do aught but indorse the conduct of his colleague when called in consultation, whether he mentally approves it or not.

To take out a protective patent for any process, instrument or apparatus, any device, system or therapeutic combination whereby lives may be saved, health restored or suffering assuaged, no matter how ingenious it may be nor how much

To withhold from the widest publicity any discovery he may make whereby other physicians and surgeons may save themselves labor and expense, and materially increase their incomes is a crime.

No other profession is so hampered. The scholar may copyright all his books, plays, pictures, photographs, drawings, titles and designs.

The tradesman can patent his trade methods, fixtures, labels and trade marks. The architect can protect his building plans, sketches and perspectives. Even the dispenser of religion, whether he be priest or bishop, is freely permitted to seek the protection of the copyright laws or the patent office, in case he devises anything useful or beautiful. Teachers, lawyers, scholars, lecturers, bankers, brokers, agents, politicians, statesmen, poets, musicians, managers, scientists-none of these are in the least hindered by written or unwritten law from enjoying the full benefits, whether of fame or fortune derivable from any of their inventions, discoveries or freaks of fancy.

The doctor alone must surrender all claim to his intellectual offspring. "It is unbecoming to the dignity" of the doctor or surgeon to receive any protection or emolument from anything he may devise, the single exception being that if he kicks over the professional traces and writes a novel-good, bad or indifferent, decent or diabolical, he may copyright it, and if he fails of appreciation, he may publish it— at his own expense!

There is no possible reason in law, ethics or common justice, for this special discrimination. The shrewdest members of the profession, it must be confessed, evade the senseless edict by taking out patents in the name of a friend, and by sharing the profits of schemes of which they are the real but secret and silent proprietors.