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Another illuminating, chiropractic advice: "How are you to charge what the case ought to pay? It's a question of salesmanship. But the trouble with you fellows is you're trying to tell your patients something and expecting your patient to believe something you don't believe yourself. The result is that your patient knows you're lying to him. Now I look them in the eye. And they know I know that I know that I know that I am not kidding them and they're not kidding themselves and they're not kidding me. And they're perfectly willing to lay down the big money. The difference between us is that you go about it in a sneaking way."
Thus strangely naiïve and careless of utterance were the chiropractors,* who, despite their 20,000 practitioners and legal permission to work in 36 states and the District of Columbia,* are confessedly degenerating before the hard onslaught of the American Medical Association. They permitted Mrs. Palmer, the Mabel of Mr. Palmer's speech, to tell an anecdote of a woman friend who, all panting and excited, came wailing to her: "Oh, my dear, I have had such a harrowing experience. I was dining with a very dear friend. After we got up she said, 'Oh, I feel sick. It's my stomach.' She fell on the floor. I did not know what to do. There was nobody to call. The only thing I could think of was to punch her where the chiropractor punches me. I've had stomach trouble for years, you know. Well, I punched her and punched her, and, my dear, she died in my arms."
The present evil times for chiropractors they blame vaguely on Dr. Palmer. But Dr. William H. Werner of New York City, slickly barbered president of the American Bureau of Chiropractic and hence technical head of the profession, went to his defense, venomously: "It's all wrong for you to go on cursing and damning and abusing B. J. It is not right folks. He is human. He has his little weaknesses, as who among us has not? He has his faults. But let us not go on cursing, abusing, and damning him. ... I tell you, friends, it gave me a heartache to see those great [school] buildings [at Davenport] nearly empty and that great school [of chiropractic] almost without pupils. It wrung my heart to the uttermost."
His admission pleased Dr. Morris Fishbein who has been managing the American Medical Association's long and harsh fight against chiropractors and irregular practitioners of medicine. Dr. Fishbein recently prophesied that chiropractic would perish within two years.
To keep his profession from extinction, to get his fellow practitioners out of jail, President Werner exhorted his colleagues to give their Bureau $25 each a week for an indefinite period: "Are we so yellow that we are going to let ourselves quietly die off while the medical profession mangles millions of our fellow beings?" For such defense the chiropractors last week contributed exactly nothing.*
At San Antonio, last week, Dr. James R. Brain, president of the Texas Chiropractic College there, ejected two policemen from his building. They stood on the sidewalk and would not let him go outdoors, because he would not submit to smallpox vaccination ordered by Dr. William A. King, city health director.