Life, 1914-07-30 · page 26 of 40
Life — July 30, 1914 — page 26: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes the medical profession through both cartoon and essay. The top illustration by Mary Lanem Millan depicts a domestic scene with the caption "Weather Forecast: Local Showers, Followed by General Disturbances"—likely a humorous visual pun about doctors causing domestic upheaval. The essay "Best People: the Doctors" is more pointed satire. It argues that while doctors are an ancient and necessary profession, they've consistently been wrong throughout history. The text catalogs medicine's failures: treatments discarded as worthless, theories proven false, medicines abandoned for ash-piles of obsolescence. Doctors are portrayed as "habitually mistaken," confidently promoting theories that repeatedly fail. The lower cartoon, "Wilhelmina Tell and the Apple," appears to reference the William Tell legend, likely suggesting doctors are as reckless and dangerous as shooting apples off someone's head—an act of foolish risk. The satire targets medical incompetence and misplaced professional confidence during an era when medical science was genuinely experimental and unreliable.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
WEATHER FORECAST LOCAL SHOWERS, FOLLOWED BY GENERAL DISTURBANCES Best People: the Doctors HATEVER their defects, we shall not do without the ministers. Nor without the doctors, either. They also are an age-long, immemorial habit of the human race. Before there was history there were doctors, and always there have been irreverent men who have made game of them and doubted the efficacy of their treatments, More- over, the scoffers have always had abundant reason on their side, for Goctoring has always been, and still is, an experiment, and the history of medicine is a record of treatments and medicines discarded because they were found to be worthless, and superseded by other treatments and medicines most of which went: to the ash-pile in their due turn, Doctors have been so habitually mistaken, have confided WILHELMINA TELL AND THE APPLE so steadily in means and theories that have turned out to be wrong, that comicbooks.com