Judge, 1918-05-25 · page 9 of 36
Judge — May 25, 1918 — page 9: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes both medical practice and doctors' legislative lobbying in early 20th-century America. The main text mocks doctors for advocating absurd treatments—red blankets for smallpox, red silk underwear against sunstroke, blue glass for St. Vitus's dance—while claiming medical authority. It criticizes their new Latin slogan "Vox Medici est Vox Dei" ("The voice of the doctor is the voice of God"), presented as propaganda in legislative halls. The author argues doctors use obscure prescriptions to confuse patients and charge high fees ($2 house calls). He compares their power to judges profiting from fines—both professions sentence people without accountability. The bottom illustration, "Dreams of the Convalescent," depicts a fevered patient's surreal hallucinations. The satire targets medical paternalism and doctors' growing political influence over healthcare legislation during a period of significant medical transition.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
world that they are prepared escape. It was possible to run him down in the open. ‘They use motor cars now. Then a smart doctor got a regular idea. A smallpox patient had red spots on him. Remedy: Wrap him ina red blanket and the spots would get discouraged at competi- tion and go away. Only a little while ago in Baltimore a doctor worked out a sys- tem of obviating sunstroke by wearing red silk under- wear. Ask your pet doctor how long ago it was that the blue glass treatment was in vogue. It'is less than seven years since a St. Louis doctor advocated red glass rays for St. Vitus’s dance. Go on and laugh at the Indian medicine man trying with a tom-tom to scare a to get up onacold night out of a warm bed and wade to little Willie’s colicky bedside for two dollars—maybe. They have a new slogan now, the doctors. They are tacking it up in the halls of legislation. It reads: Vox Medici est Vox Dei. Yes, its Latin, the same language they write the prescriptions in to keep you from finding out what a chump you are, and they tell me it means, “The voice of the doctor is the voice of God.” Nonsense, you say? Is that so, Pericles? Well, go you and peek at some of the bills they’re trying to jam through the legislatures these days. I know they mean well, my dear child, but so did the cold in the head out of a man, but how much edge has he on the doctor who shoves the helpless patient into an electric range: to chase rheumatism? Truly we're a lot of funny folks. What would you by R. B. Fettes Bobby—Darn it! think of a plan to make the income of judges depend on the fines they imposed, and when they got twice as big a fee for every man they sentenced to the chair? I wonder how many of us would be out of jail. Well, the doctors sentence us to this or that, and they have to decide whether we need a leg more than they need a thousand dollars; we excuse them if they guess wrong. But they’re a pretty decent crowd, and they doa lot better than most of the other professions. They kiss comfort good-by when they announce to a waiting Draren by Acxes Lee I thought this was a circus! chap who killed a fly on an- other fellow’s head with an axe. Anyway, don’t forget that medicine is a progressive science. It travels in circles and cycles and squirrel cages, and so on, and every now and then as the merry-go-round passes Asklepios’ s old temple some modern doctor grabs the brass ring, and the rest all get off to see if the old stuff still works, and it always does, for as Hungry-Joe once sagely remarked: “There’s one born every.minute.” Of course he meant a human being, didn’t he now? Yes, Clareace, you may answer. Wait a minute until we shut the door so the‘kind editor may not hear you. Now then Clarence. He meant a kind of fish? Ah, yest Dreams oF THE CONVALESCENT