Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. MEDICAL INSTRUCTION OF THE LAITY IN THE LAY PRESS. It is certainly unwise for physicians to attempt professional instruction of the laity in the lay press by means of signed articles. In the first place, such articles blur the distinctions between their writers and advertising charlatans; in the second place, the tendency in such articles is to say the brilliant rather than the true. Yet, after all, should not the laity be instructed medically in the lay press? By all means. The instruction in physiology and hygiene presented in the common schools is distinctly inadequate and is, moreover, imparted to the learner at a time of his life when he can not by any possibility correctly estimate its importance and therefore the necessity of remembering it far on into later years. Besides, in the common schools practically nothing is said of disease. It might be urged that the less the laity learns of disease, the better for the laity. But notions of disease, superficial though they necessarily are, the laity will have, and if it does not get them from doctors, it will get them from almanacs, fences, barns and billboards. To anyone practising medicine it would seem unnecessary to urge the immense amount of harm that comes from wide-spread medical misinformation. The worry and depression in cases of disease that are either slight or non-existent; the difficulty on the part of physicians to secure intelligent cooperation, especially in the country; the enormous amount of injury from the use of patent medicines; the large number of lives lost that might have been saved had the patients had in time the slightest inkling of the real nature of their maladies; these are a few of the considerations which to any thinking physician present themselves at once. How should the matte...