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Show MORE ETHICS. The report that at a meeting of many Salt Lake physicians and surgeons held early this week a stricter adherence was urged to the so-called so-called "ethics" of that profession 'should prove a cheering piece of news to that portion of the public pub-lic unfortunate enough to require the services of a physician. The ethics of the medical profession as that term is interpreted by very many doctors, and the popular interpretation of which is forced on the real men in the profession has come to be a shield behind which a horde of medical quacks and incompetent, unschooled and dangerous men seek safety from the havoc they create among the afflicted. No profession in this country is so hedged ' about by ethics as the medical, and the institution institu-tion has flourished and developed until it has walled in the good and bad alike with the result that competent and proven practitioners And themselves obligated in many cases to assume as-sume an attitude in their work at once as hypocritical hypo-critical and unjust to their patients as it is distasteful dis-tasteful to themselves. Why a reputable physician physi-cian should, because of a code of ethics, feel it incumbent upon himself to avoid criticism of some one of his profession less skillful, inadequately inade-quately schooled and who, perhaps by bungling, has endangered a life, is something the lay mind does not grasp with the readiness with which it seems to be disseminated among physicians. It is only in the rarest instances that a doctor called in on a case that another has treated can be induced by the patient to admit that in his opinion a mistake of any kind has been made, and so far is this practice carried that patients are subjected to the gravest doubts and uncertainties uncer-tainties and very often a distracted mental condition con-dition totally unnecessary. The solution of the evil for that portion of the medical profession on whom the ethical code works the greatest hardship, those men who by schooling, training and experience are above criticism, undoubtedly lies in the enactment of new laws in every state raising the qualifications that must be met before a license to practice Is issued to a doctor, until those qualifications are on such a plane that their fulfillment upon examination will guarantee to the public that no ethical code will be necessary to protect a physician phy-sician or enable him to profitably practico his profession. It would mean a new set of laws covering and enforcing examination before physicians phy-sicians could practice in most of the western states, and it is doubtful if very much objection - would be heard to such a procedure from the average physician who has been graduated from a school of high standing and whose work there and in the hospitals later fitted him to pass a rigorous examination. |