Chap. Ill, Art. I, Sec. 4.

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.

"We realized that the traditional principles of the Massachusetts Medical Society warned practitioners to keep their personal and professional activities out of the lay Press as much as possible. However, the circumstances which confronted us in this case were such that a policy of direction, control and restraint in apportioning news which seemed autocratic to us appeared unharnessed to many members of the [medical] profession looking on from the outside. . . ."

The Committee on Ethics & Discipline of the Massachusetts Medical Society accepted Dr. Truesdale's apology. "Dr. Truesdale," the Committee acknowledged, "realized the obligation to preserve a decent professional reserve and at the same time avoid alienating the Press, whose good offices our profession has had many occasions to acknowledge with gratitude." But the Committee found cause to snarl because "a quasi-official endorsement of the publicity was offered by the assignment of the New York Academy of Medicine of its press liaison officer to report the operation for the Associated Press." That special reporter for the A. P. was tousle-headed Dr. lago Galdston (born Israel Goldstein), 41, executive secretary of the New York Academy's Medical Information Bureau and Press Relations Committee, who had, before the McHenry girl reached Fall River, assured New York editors that an operation for diaphragmatic hernia was a surgical commonplace and not worth reporting.

Last week, Dr. Truesdale, although not excommunicated from Organized Medicine, felt the weight of his colleagues' professional ire. He was vice president of the Massachusetts Medical Society and reasonably expected to continue to hold other offices. At the Massachusetts Society's convention in Boston last week the nominating committee pointedly refused to nominate Dr. Truesdale for any office whatsoever.

Meanwhile Alyce Jane McHenry continued to ride high on a prospering wave of publicity. Her mother Luella McHenry, an Omaha department store clerk, no longer has to work. Her father Paul, a Sioux City, Iowa salesman, left his job to become reconciled with her mother. Her sister Frances Jean quit school to share in the glory and excitement.

Last week the McHenry quartet was touring New York City. They appeared at the Bronx Zoo, the Aquarium, Palisades Amusement Park, Woolworth Tower, the Normandie, N. Y. Police Department Headquarters, McAlpin Hotel and Hearn's Department Store where small, smiling Alyce was billed as "the upside-down tummy girl."

When informed of the snub Massachusetts Medicine had given Dr. Truesdale as a result of her case, she wept great tears and cried: "Those cruel, old fogy New England doctors. . . . Oh, I love Dr. Truesdale. What can I do to help him? He was grand to me."

*Excerpts: "You do solemnly swear . . . That you will be loyal to the Profession of Medicine and just and generous to its members; That you will lead your lives and practice your art in uprightness and honor; That into what ever house you shall enter, it shall be for the good of the sick to the utmost of your power, you holding yourselves far aloof from wrong, from corruption, from the tempting of others to vice; That you will exercise your art solely for the cure of your patients, and will give no drug, perform no operation for a criminal purpose, even if solicited; far less suggest it: That whatsoever you shall see or hear of the lives of men which is not fitting to be spoken, you will keep inviolably sacred."

/-Last week wise old President Livingston Farrand of Cornell University, himself a doctor, told graduates of Cornell University Medical College not to let the medical dome constrict them. Said he: ''The medical profession (and the legal profession) have that tendency to think that whatever was is right and that change and development are wrong."

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