Life, 1914-04-23 · page 18 of 44
Life — April 23, 1914 — page 18: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains satirical commentary on medical ethics and eugenic policy. The main letter criticizes attacks on *Life* magazine for exposing unethical hospital experiments on poor children, defending *Life*'s investigative journalism against charges of "lying insinuations." The writer documents actual cases where children sent to hospitals with measles contracted venereal disease, citing legitimate newspaper reports and state investigations. The letter argues that experiments on vulnerable slum children are morally indefensible, using the same logic applied to animal testing. It references Dr. L. Emmett Holt and Dr. Noguchi's documented experiments on hospital patients. The cartoon below satirizes eugenic marriage requirements, showing a suitor needing to prove his "worth" to an "eugenic father" before winning his daughter's hand—mocking contemporary eugenic ideology's pretensions. The "News of the Day" section offers ironic commentary on Rockefeller's amusement palace and compulsory nursing training for sixteen-year-old girls.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
A Little Matter of Veracity To tHe Eprror or Lire: “Lying insinuations,” “ malicious un- truth,” “the back-handed thrust of gen- erality to conceal the falsity of what ad- mits of no proof,” “ slander,” “ meanest of journalistic crimes"—such are the Boston Herald's characterizations of Lire’s denunciation of hospital tests with germs and serums, made upon in- fants and other defenseless charity patients. It is not unlikely that Lire read in the New York Times of May 11th, 1913, of a suit brought by a father against the city hospital, and in the New York Sun of December 21st another case, both of children sent there with measles and returned home with venereal disease; of a similar case in Brooklyn; of the city investigation of the hospitals; of the report of the New York State Board of Char published March oth, which denounces hospital condi- tions as disgraceful, with intemperate men and women participating in the care of over nineteen hundred children. The New York daily newspapers pub- lishing these facts are not anti-vivisec- tionists, neither are the lawyers bringing the suits, nor the State Board of Chari- ties anti-vivisectionists. Dr. L. Emmett Holt’s use of one thousand children in the Babies’ Hospital wards for tuberculin tests'and Dr. Noguchi’s use of one hun- dred and forty-six non-syphilitic patients (este. in various hospitals for his experiments are described, the first in the Archives of Pediatrics for January, 1909, and the other in the Journal of Experimental Medicine for December, 1911. Anti- vivisectionists had nothing to do with all this, or with bringing it to public knowledge in the first place. Whatever may be “ the meanest of jour- nalistic crimes "—and there is certainly a fairly large variety to choose from— Lirz would never be easily convicted of lacking courage or making charges by indirection. The truth is that every argument brought forward for the use in labora- tories of defenseless little unowned animals of no particular value, can be made for experimentation on diseased and unacknowledged slum children—the great mass of undesired babies that be- come “undesirables "—and with tenfold the force of the common plea for the use of animals, “that they were meant for the service of man"—in that the information to be obtained is not, like that from dogs’, cats’ and rabbits’ en- trails, often misleading, but the real human thing. “The final experiment must always be on man,” says E. H. Starling, M.D., F.R.S., London. What person of ordi- nary intelligence can doubt that it is so made, every day, everywhere? Yours very truly, E. H. Cremenr. Bostox, Mass., March 21, 1914. Sn weR — GETTING HER EUGENIC FATHER'S CONSENT News of the Day (As It Ought To Be.) R. JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER gave up fifty millions for a palace of amusement in the metropolis for the benefit of the poor, in which there was to be no uplift, no process of im- proving anything, but a place where the poor people could go and enjoy themselves. The New York World announced that it would improve its present make-up and typographical appearance so that it could be read with pleasure by any person of average intelligence and eyesight. It was announced that a National School .of Diplomacy for the training of future ambassadors would be started in Washington. All girls of sixteen will be compelled to take a two-years’ course in house- keeping and nursing, under the charge of the National Woman's Service De- partment. Officers of the Immigration Bureau were replaced by. gentlemen. Government control of all operations went into effect. Under the new rule no citizen of the United States can be operated upon without the sanction of the State, THE ARDENT SUITOR MUST PROVE HIS WORTH BEFORE RECEIVING THE HAND OF HIS ONLY DAUGHTER