Doug Pugh

First, the good medicine.

July 8th, 1925, was Duncan Cameron Day in Alpena. Fifteen thousand citizens lined the parade route from Central High School to Memorial Hall, along which marched hundreds of people, all of whose births had been attended by Dr. Duncan Cameron.

Dr. Cameron practiced medicine here for 40 years, a span of time during which he shepherded the entrance into this sphere of 2,700 of our former citizens. During that tenure, he tended to our sick to the extent his knowledge, ability, and limited resources enabled him.

A grateful community raised funds used to purchase a new Buick, one that the Buick dealer discounted as a contribution to the cause. They also built a garage to house the new car and covered the costs of the insurance and license plates necessary for its operation. The sum of $832.14 was left over — equivalent to $15,400 today — they gave it to him.

A new car, a garage, cash, and a parade! Why?

My mother’s family had nothing. Her father died when she was 3 years old. There was no Social Security, no food stamps, no Medicaid. My grandmother supported her family at a poverty level by taking in other people’s laundry and cleaning their houses. But before she acquired sufficient customers, she had to rely, for a time, on the county dole to feed and house her family.

I said they had nothing, but that’s not entirely true. Though kids in my mother’s neighborhood had more things than she did, my mother always felt sorry for them — because they didn’t have her mother.

There are things that have value, and then there are more valuable things.

Dr. Cameron extended his care, skill, and knowledge to my grandmother and her family, despite protests that she could not pay. “Not to worry, Mrs. Goudy, not to worry,” he would reply.

Worries of many families in this community were similarly allayed.

That’s the good medicine.

Now, the bad medicine.

In 1948, my grandmother, now elderly, was living with my mother, father, and me when she slipped and fell, sustaining a serious injury. Dr. Cameron was no longer with us.

It was another doctor who prescribed treatment, treatment that was the proximate cause of her death.

Dr. Cameron attended medical school at the University of Montreal. He completed an internship at a hospital affiliated with that university, graduating as a medical doctor in 1884. He came to Alpena in 1885.

The Doctor whose treatment caused my grandmother’s death attended a non-university-affiliated proprietary school that existed briefly between 1897 and 1903. There was no internship.

It was a school that taught a pseudoscientific system of medicine promoting remedies based on the mixing of substances. The practitioner would shake the mixture to cause the solution to “remember.” It was taught that such preparations could treat and cure disease.

All relevant scientific knowledge contradicted these “remedies,” as they had no objectively observable effect on any known disease and were inconsistent with the scientific determinations of their actual causes, namely, viruses and bacteria.

Faith healers, for a fee, claimed to arrange divine interventions, but were unable to provide evidence of verifiable cures.

Slowly, things began to change. University-affiliated medical schools became the norm, raising standards. Schools like McGill and Johns Hopkins University Medical Schools led the transformation of medical education in Canada and the United States, resulting in the closure of substandard, proprietary schools that lacked any substantiation for their continued existence.

When Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876, the keynote address was delivered by the renowned British scientist Thomas Huxley.

Huxley considered veracity to be the foundation of morality, a concept embodied in his famous quote:

“The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying.”

My grandmother died from a lie, a medical treatment based on a supposition with no basis in the morality of objective truth.

May your mothers and grandmothers, your children and grandchildren, live long and healthy lives, receiving medical care based on a foundation of morality.

You need not advise your children that the emperor wears no clothes; they have doubtless already discerned that, but you should alert them to the odds on proposition that an emperor bedecked in invisible threads is a dubious source for morally derived medical guidance.

Doug Pugh’s column, “Vignettes,” appears monthly on the first Saturday of the month. Pugh was the probate judge of Alpena County for 24 years. Reach him at pughda@gmail.com.