The Intimidatory Aspect
The uninformed critic might well ask how the deception of the usefulness of vivisection could be kept alive within the medical community itself, considering that there have always been prominent dissenters among them.
Walter Hadwen, one of the most eminent British MDs in the first half of the 20th century, explains this phenomenon in the preface of a book he wrote about one of those dissenting MDs, titled "The Difficulties of Dr. Deguerre." The conditions that Dr. Hadwen describes are no less true today:
"No medical man during his student days is taught to think. He is expected to assimilate the thoughts of others and to bow to authority. Throughout the whole of his medical career he must accept the current medical fashions of the day or suffer the loss of prestige and place. No public appointments, no coveted preferments are open to the medical man who declines to parrot the popular shibboleths of his profession. His qualifications may be beyond reproach, he may himself possess qualities that command respect, but unless he is prepared to think and act within the narrow circle of accepted dogmas, he must be prepared for a more or less isolated path.
"The public press today is largely governed by the orthodox rulers in the medical profession. The ubiquitous 'Medical Correspondent', who draws his inspiration from the pages of current fashionable medical literature, is expected to supply only such copy as will gratify the tastes of the mysterious power that stands supreme behind the editorial chair. The views of the unorthodox are, with rare exceptions, refused. So rigid is the control which medical orthodoxy holds over the public mind, that not a word upon health matters, however important and interesting, is ever allowed to be broadcast by wireless unless it is approved and sanctioned by the bureaucrats of the Health Ministry.
"Every now and then some new medical "discovery" is proclaimed with clamorous voice. The public eye is arrested by commanding headlines in the leading organs of the popular press. The simultaneousness of appearance and the similarity of the announcements leave no doubt as to how the whole scheme has been engineered. It may be a new cancer-germ discovery; a new serum, vaccine or chemical inoculation; a new theory concerning some old-fashioned disease dressed up in a new garb; a new outcry against flies, fleas, lice, cockroaches, dogs, cats, parrots, rats, or goats; but upon reflection, it will always be found that these "discoveries" are entirely devoid of originality.
"It is safe to say that among all these flaming pronouncements no real discovery has been made, no original medical idea has been promulgated, no permanent contribution to medical science has beenfurnished, no advancement of medicine has been achieved. The public press has been utilized for the propagation of little else than medical sensationalism, proved to be such in time by clinical and statistical experience. Practically all the modern claims of medicine are based upon the theories of Jenner and Pasteur, who have been exalted almost to the position of deities, whose dicta it is held to be impious to question. Those theories, in spite of a strenuous and increasing struggle to fix them upon a scientific basis, remain without foundation."
Modern medicine's scientific basis may be missing, but its financial profits are healthy, and anybody who jeapardizes them is in for trouble, or worse. Who is "the mysterious power that stands supreme behind the editorial chair" which Dr. Hadwen hints at? The answer stands recorded in at least two books, Morris Bealle's The Drug Story, first published in the '40s and reprinted thirty-six times and maybe more since then, although no American bookstore ever dared handling it; and NAKED EMPRESS or The Great Medical Fraud, published and republished in the '80s.