Here's Your Hat!

"The family doctor is indispensable to the community and the nation . . . nine times out of ten he is as well able to handle a case as the specialist is; and . . . if the profession does not take care, the family doctor will vanish. . . . The medical profession, by its drift toward specialization, is handing the family doctor his hat and showing him the door. At the same time, we the general practitioners are implored to stay, but we cannot long survive the economic competition with superspecialism. It is a vicious circle."

These opinions appear in the preface of a book entitled Doctor, Here's Your Hat (published last January*), by Dr. Joseph Ambrose Jerger of Chicago. On account of them ruddy, lusty, leonine Dr. Jerger was in trouble last week with the American Medical Association--which itself is in trouble with the Department of Justice on anti-trust charges.

Dr. Jerger has a taste for Scotch & soda, a flair for anecdote, a willingness to think for himself. He once wrote to the hard-boiled sage of Baltimore, H. L. Mencken, suggesting that condemned criminals be given their choice of execution or submitting themselves as subjects for medical research. Mencken advised him that U. S. sentimentality would never stand for such a procedure.

In Doctor, Here's Your Hat, Dr. Jerger also tells that he was called out to a farmer's house one day on a confinement case, got into the wrong bedroom while the farmer was stabling his horse, palpated the abdomen of a sleeping schoolteacher by mistake.

This candid author was born in England 59 years ago, ran off to the Boer War in 1899, almost died of enteric fever, met Mark Twain on a boat going to England. Mark Twain medicated the convalescent with Tom & Jerries (rum, hot water, cinnamon, eggs), persuaded him to go to the U. S. Jerger did so, got through his medical schooling and internship in Chicago, settled in Waterloo, Ia. Eventually he returned to Chicago and built up a fine surgical practice; but he never forgot that he was a family doctor.

Some weeks ago Dr. Jerger was haled before a Chicago Medical Society committee on charges that his book and magazine writings violated A. M. A. rules against "self-aggrandizement and solicitation of patients." Later, he claims that he and his patients were barred from all Chicago hospitals.

Last week Dr. Jerger journeyed to Washington to see how his case would look to Assistant Attorney General Thurman Wesley Arnold. Meanwhile, in Manhattan, he eased his mind: "Mark Twain told me that this was a land of free speech and liberty. Well, so it is, but Dr. Fishbein [Morris Fishbein, A. M. A. spokesman and Journal editor] is a dictator, a Hitler. I believe in organized medicine. Socialization is fatal. But the trouble here is too much concentrated power, power that will not stand for criticism. So I am going down to Washington and see what can be done. It is not that my own case is of special importance, but that unless something is done to end this situation there can be no independence of thought or action in American medicine."

* Prentice-Hall ($2.75).

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