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they choose, so long as it does helpful work among the class which is
numerically vastly the largest bulk of the human race, i.e. the fools,
the idiots, the pudd'nheads.
We do not guess, we know that 9 in 10 of the species are pudd'nheads. We
know it by various evidences; and one of them is, that for ages the
race has respected (and almost venerated) the physician's grotesque
system--the emptying of miscellaneous and harmful drugs into a person's
stomach to remove ailments which in many cases the drugs could not reach
at all; in many cases could reach and help, but only at cost of damage
to some other part of the man; and in the remainder of the cases the
drug either retarded the cure, or the disease was cured by nature in
spite of the nostrums. The doctor's insane system has not only been
permitted to continue its follies for ages, but has been protected by
the State and made a close monopoly--an infamous thing, a crime against
a free-man's proper right to choose his own assassin or his own method
of defending his body against disease and death.
And yet at the same time, with curious and senile inconsistency, the
State has allowed the man to choose his own assassin--in one detail--the
patent-medicine detail--making itself the protector of that perilous
business, collecting money out of it, and appointing no committee of
experts to examine the medicines and forbid them when extra dangerous.
Really, when a man can prove that he is not a jackass, I think he is in
the way to prove that he is no legitimate member of the race.
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