Upon graduating from medical school each & every doctor must swear the Oath of Hippocrates.* Upon being admitted to the American Medical Association and its constituent state and county medical societies, the doctor must agree to the Constitution, By-Laws and Principles of Medical Ethics of the A. M. A. Those documents contain 146 rules which place the practice of medicine in the U. S. under a closed professional dome which doctors want their patients to believe is the most beautiful, unselfish, beneficent thing on earth.† Any physician who by accident or design happens to get into the lay spotlight runs a serious risk of being tossed out of Organized Medicine. Chief catapult is Chapter III, Article I, Section 4, of the Principles of Medical Ethics, which pertains to "advertising" and reads in part: ". . . It is equally unprofessional to procure patients ... by furnishing or inspiring newspaper or magazine comments concerning cases in which the physician has been or is concerned."
Under this rule most U. S. Medicine is practiced out of sight and sound of the rest of the country, and brave or foolhardy is the doctor who dares to speak out to the laity on a particular medical or surgical case, a disease or treatment, a research project. As a result Medicine, by & large, has the worst press relations of any U. S. profession.
A newsworthy doctor who is currently in trouble with Organized Medicine as a result of clumsy press relations is Dr. Philemon Edwards Truesdale of Fall River, Mass. Last winter an Omaha colleague sent Dr. Truesdale a 10-year-old patient named Alyce Jane McHenry who was suffering from diaphragmatic hernia. Before Dr. Truesdale could operate, the Press had taken possession of the McHenry case, front-paged the child as the "upsidedown stomach girl" (TIME, March 11). Anticipating that Massachusetts Medicine would promptly call him on the carpet and demand his explanation of all this publicity, Dr. Truesdale forehandedly asked for a hearing, got one, then last month wrote a long, abject "Letter to the Medical Profession," setting forth the entire case in the New England Journal of Medicine. Excerpts:
"When brought into the limelight unavoidably, this little patient, with unusual personal charm, captivated the public with a sympathy and solicitude that gave the publicity a momentum which has not found its limit. . . . The press correspondents were numerous, ardent and eager. They manifested some evidence of becoming rapacious. They claimed title to news and would not be unslaked.
"A policy of treating newspapermen as gentlemen seemed worthy of a trial. We followed this line of action with whatever restrictions we could exact. I may state parenthetically that, with only an occasional exception, the reporters conducted themselves as ladies and gentlemen.
"The stage was so set that had they been so inclined they could have converted the scene into a jubilee, the hospital into a shrine and the doctors into mountebanks.