Excerpt from The Cleveland Medical Gazette, Vol. 1: September, 1886 When jurors shall all become intelligent and moral; when lawyers shall have no other ends in view than the attainment of exact justice; when courts shall become incorruptible; in the good time coming, when every man shall be a law unto himself, and repressive statute laws shall be well-nigh needless, we shall see a tolerable correspondence between what we call wholesome laws and human conduct, and not till then. It is a comparatively easy matter to get laws enacted, but generally a very difficult matter to get them thoroughly enforced, even if the enforcement of them is a thing to be desired. It will be found in the end that it is worse than useless for one system, as that of medicine, to attempt to remedy its defects and its faults by the aid of another system, as that of law, which is equally defective and more faulty. We cannot make a really good article out of defective material with the help of poor tools. There is a wide-spread superstition pervading the community, from which physicians are not exempt, that defective human character can so organize itself, socially, as to get out of itself conduct that is not proportionately defective; that by some well contrived legal device society can be cured of all its follies, and saved from the consequences of them. Societies are made up of individual units; the character of the society is as the average of the characters of these units, and the extent to which laws can elevate such characters is almost 7221. If society is to be forever guarded against its own ignorance and folly by law, when will it learn to guard itself against these evils and, moreover, who shall play the part of its perpetual guardian? Shall the physician? There is, there can be, no genuine reform, but voluntary, personal reform there is no reform of organizations like the medical profession, but such as comes through the individual reform of its members. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.