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The Golden Age
Published Ebery Thursday by the Golden Age Publishing
Company (Inc.)
OFFICES: AUSTELL "BUILDING, ATLANTA, GA.
WILLIAM U. UPSHAW .... Editor
MRS G. U. LI NDS E Y - ■ Managing Editor
LEN G. HROUGHTON - - Pulpit Editor
Price: $2 a Year
Ministers $1.50 per Year
In eases of foreign address fifty cents should be added to cober
additional postage
Entered in the Post Office in Atlanta, Ga.
as second-class matter
Dear Old "Family Doctor. n
The editor of The Golden Age, never hospitable
to such an idea, is certainly in a very unwelcome
frame of mind just now con
-Btay With Us Yet — cerning the discussion going
Stay With Us Yet. the rounds of the papers
about the relegation of the
time-honored family physician in favor of the pure
ly professional specialist for every ill.
The place of the family physician in the inner
circle of the family affections is almost as sacred
as that of the pastor —and indeed, when the physi
cian is what he ought to be, a Godly man, he can
walk through the door that has been opened by
his tender skill into a place in the heart where few
ministers themselves are ever fortunate enough to
come.
These thoughts, brought up afresh by a stirring
editorial from the pen of Lucian L. Knight in The
Atlanta Georgian, have been put into shining ital
ics by the experience through which the man who
dictated these lines is now passing at Winona Mis
sissippi.
Since the recent accident which threw the
editor on bed with a broken leg (not in a sanita
rium, thank you, blessed as these institutions gen
erally are) but in the home-like home of Pastor
Martin Ball and his dear Scottish “gude-wife” we
have had such an opportunity to see the ideal fam
ily physician on his throne in the hearts of the
home as our busy, whirling life had not given us
for years. The fact is we have seen two of them
at once —Dr. T. R. Trotter, grand old man of seven
ty-three, who has been the physician of the home for
many years, and Dr. J. M. Middleton, who was near
the scene of the accident and rendered “first aid
to the injured,” have labored day in and day out,
hand in hand and heart to heart, trying to soften
the suffering with the boundless benediction of their
skill, wrapped all up in Christian tenderness and
fellowship. They are doctors of the good old family
type. They are men of sturdy frame, and modern
skill, but above all they have that beautiful faith
and philosophy which enable them to carry to the
sick room what the sufferer often needs more than
the ministry of medical genius—they know how and
when to drop the fatherly “God bless you” that falls
"like down from some high angel’s wings.” Heaven
bless yet more the good old family physician who
carries healing for the body and balm for the soul.
As a tribute to the golden days of fellowship we
have had together through days of shadow and sun
shine, we dedicate what has been said and what Mr.
Knight says in the following editorial to Doctors
Trotter and Middleton, the editor’s faithful physi
cians at Winona, Mississippi:
The old family physician is endangered. With
the arrival of the specialist he is being pressed
farther and farther to the rear.
It is to the treatment of specific diseases that the
modem disciple of Hippocrates is devoting his at
tention.
And some idea of the change which has already
come over the family doctor under the modifying
touch of modern conditions may be obtained from
the remark which was recently made by a physi
cian in Boston. Said he:
“I heard of a woman who was very proud of her
The Golden Age for March 31,1910.
QUITS ADVERTISING LIQUOR
One by one the high toned, conscientious news
papers of the land are coming “up higher” into the
atmosphere and fellowship of clean
Raleigh hands and safe leadership. For no paper
Paper is either clean or safe that deliberately
Joins the sells the white virtue of its advertising
Fellowship space for the spread and encouragement
of Clean of the liquor traffic. Os course, we know
Hands. that nearly all of the country weeklies
are true enough to the homes which they
enter not to go to those firesides as a whiskey
drummer. But it is the daily papers that need
converting. And we rejoice to note that one after
another they are “coming through”. The most
conspicuous example is The Raleigh (N. C.) Even
ing Times. This bright, scintillating paper, with its
large circulation, makes the following manly con
fession:
“After April Ist The Evening Times will not carry
whiskey advertisements. This means that not only
will whiskey advertisements be discontinued but
all advertisements of a questionable nature
will be rigidly debarred from the columns of this
newspaper. This action is taken after mature con
sideration, and the future policy of the paper will
be conducted accordingly. The Evening Times, with
its thousands of readers throughout the State, is
now and will continue to be a mighty engine for
the development of this city and State along all
lines, and we feel it to be our duty to make this
change of policy and place a paper in the homes
of our readers that will be a powerful leader in
the various walks and developments of life. This
action will undoubtedly bring a financial loss but
we are conscious of the wonderful power and influ
ence of this paper in the thousands of homes to
which it is a welcome visitor, and our policy will
be to zealously guard and increase the sphere of its
usefulness and influence.”
'Good boy!” “Good eye, Mr. Pitcher,” as the fans
say on the baseball field. The editor who will de
liberately pitch a barrel of booze, a bottle of liquor,
or a keg of beer over the “home base,” regardless
of those who may be knocked out by the delivery,
and in spite of the umpire’s protest of “foul play,” and
the righteous hisses and jeers of every decent man
family doctor, and was urging a friend to employ
him.
“ ‘Why, he’s the best family physician I ever saw,’
she added as a final recommendation. ‘He can tell
you right away which is the best specialist to call
in whenever you are ill. He knows all of them by
name and doesn’t keep you waiting for a second
to tell you just the one you need.’ So you see
that is what the family physician has become,” he
concluded, “only the walking directory of special
ists.”
Os course the remark smacks of hyperbole. But
it states in exaggerated form what is nevertheless
true in essence, for except in the rural districts
and in the sparsely settled communities the family
physician is gradually withdrawing from serious pro
fessional activities.
And even upon the country roads his famiilar fig
ure may eventually retreat before the curling dust
and the ominous honk of the motor car.
Progress is no respecter of sentiment. We love
the family physician. He is endeared to us by ten
thousand tender memories. But the edicts of the
age are stern. The times are intensive. Depth
rather than area gauges the work of “wisdom’s plow
shares.”
More rapidly than either the law or the pulpit
the science of medicine has moved forward.
No single mind can embrace the whole circuit of
thought and investigation which the science has
measured within the past half century, and the logic
of necessity has called for specialization. Conse
quently the family doctor seems destined to share
the fate of the family carriage, and to disappear In
the background.
But literature has already commenced to embalm
and woman in the grandstand and bleachers —well,
that ought to be put out of the game forevermore,
or until he repents and makes confession in sacK
cloth and ashes.
Os course, we understand, everybody understands
that the paper is advertising for the money that’s
in it —nothing less, nothing more. Ah, ha! That
is just the same reason that makes the distiller
and the saloon man sell his hellish wares. And by
every law of analogy and justice, and by every de
duction, ethical and moral, the paper that does it is
as guilty of crime as the man who makes the liquor
and the man who sells it. We challenge any editor
in America to sustain the opposite of this con
tention. And you cannot separate the editorial
from the advertising columns. One prominent South
ern editor said to the writer: “The whiskey busi
ness is a legitimate business in the eye of the
National Government and we could be prosecuted
for refusing a liquor advertisement.” What folly!
What a palpable subterfuge! That editor’s heart
seemed to be struggling to get in the right place,
but the business office had a millstone about his
neck.
The Raleigh News and Observer has never been
sued. The Raleigh News is never going to be sued.
The Atlanta Georgian, during all its four years of
liquorless pages has never been sued —by liquor men,
nor even reprimanded by the Government. And
everywhere papers that do help on the liquor traf
fic for the sake of the money that’s in it, know
mighty well that there would be no legal procedure
against it if it should ever reach the point where
it would prove by the “exclusion act” that it loved
sobriety in the home better than dirty shillings in the
pocket.
But the tide of public conscience is rising. It
will not be long until every paper in the South
especially will have to purge its columns of all
complicity with the liquor business in order to
preserve its selfrespect of the public.
We welcome The Raleigh Evening Times to the
high fellowship of spotless pages, clean hands and
untainted dollars.
And yet there is room.
§§§
him and perhaps other writers at no distant day will
follow the lead of lan MacLaren’s quaint Scotch pen
in portraying the “Doctor of the Old School.”
To him in even greater measure than to the con
secrated man of God belong the gleeful prattle of
little children and the grateful tears of anxious
mothers.
For time and again he has plucked the suffering
invalid from the very jaws of death, and around the
fireside it is always with an exultant sort of “God
bless you,” that his name is mentioned.
The late Judge Howard VanEpps, in an address
to the graduating class of the Southern Medical Col
lege in Atlanta several years ago, said of the old
time doctor:
“He was skillful and gentle, sympathetic and true
* * * And when he had noted the last gasp of
his dying patient, the bereaved ones in the shaded
room next to the death chamber required and re
ceived his care, and the mute sympathy of his pres
ence in the church and at the grave and the deli
cate consolations of his friendly attentions enthron
ed him in the household heart and obtained for him
the exalted honor of being the loved and trusted
friend whom we were proud to call —our family phy
sician.”
Life Time for College President.
Dr. Wm. T. Lowrey, the popular President of Mis
sissippi College, Clinton, Miss., writes a letter of
sympathy for our injured editor, and adds:
“Here is a check for $lO. I think it a good time
to pay for a Life-Time subscription to The Golden
Age.”
It is clear that President Lowrey knows the prac
tical meaning of “how” and “when.”
