Berks County Bar Association The Berks Barrister Summer 2020 - 21

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In 1873, after the bequest of $3.5 million by Johns Hopkins
to a trust to build a university and hospital, the direction
of medical education in America finally began to change.
However, reform was not as rapid as one would hope. Even
after European medical education progressed, American
medical education lagged far behind, and that made the
medical practice lag as well. Oliver Wendell Holmes declared,
"I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as now used,
could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the
better for mankind--and all the worse for the fishes."
As late as 1900, one hundred medical schools would
accept any man - but not women - willing to pay tuition.
Twenty percent of the schools did not require even a high
school diploma for admission while only a single medical
school required its entering students to have a college degree.
Students could fail several courses, never touch a single patient,
and still earn a medical degree.
Critique of First Amendment Constitutional Rights

	 During the war, the Wilson administration controlled
free speech in frightening ways, not known in America before
or since. Congress and the president passed the Espionage
Act, the Sedition Act, and other legislation inciting fear and
paranoia among the populace. This caused Judge Learned
Hand to warn:

"That community is already in the process of dissolution
where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible
enemy, where nonconformity with the accepted creed,
political as well as religious, becomes a mark of disaffection;
where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes
the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom
of dissent... Wilson's hard line threated dissenters with
imprisonment."

Counterproductively, the government misled the people
with silence, lies, and disillusion with regard to public warnings
of the true deadliness of the disease. Regardless, Paul Lewis
and his peers formed a cadre who stood on alert, hoping against
but expecting and preparing for the eruption of an epidemic;
one that indeed occurred in 1918 (as would another 100 years
later). Is 1918 ancient history or are we again perhaps facing
the "darkest winter in modern history"?
Postscript

In the November 2018 issue of the Smithsonian magazine,
the headline read The Next Pandemic. In the warning, Barry is
quoted as underlining three messages: 1) the highest priority
is to develop a universal vaccine that confers immunity against
virtually all influenza viruses likely to infect humans.;
2) another key step to improving pandemic readiness is to
expand research on antiviral drugs; and 3) "in my view, the
most important lesson from 1918 is to tell the truth."
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Quoting Barry, "Of the twenty largest cities in America, Philadelphia, the
city								
of Benjamin Franklin and the University of Pennsylvania, spent less on
education than all but one. In all of South Philadelphia, home to hundreds
of thousands of Italians and Jews, there would be no high school until 1934."

"All this made Philadelphia fertile ground for epidemic disease. So did a
city government incapable of responding to a crisis. Muckraker Lincoln
Steffens called Philadelphia 'the worst-governed city in America.' He may
have been right."

David R. Beane, Esquire
Swanona At Historic Centre Park
606 North Fifth Street, Suite 7
P.O. Box 1339
Reading, Pennsylvania 19603
Tel: 610.378.5555
Fax: 610.378.5551
drb@beanellc.com
www.beanellc.com
Helping the Regulated Community
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Berks County Bar Association The Berks Barrister Summer 2020

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