Mark Twain was suspicious of doctors, but trusted those who cared for him. He was awarded an honorary doctor's degree in 1909. When accepting the award, Twain noted, "I am glad to be among my own kind tonight. I was once a sharpshooter, but now I practice a much higher and equally as deadly a profession".
Twain ridiculed stereotypical features of physicians, including illegible handwriting "which from the beginning of time has been so disastrous to the apothecary and so profitable to the undertaker"
The role of the patient's belief in the therapeutic process was undoubtedly reinforced for Twain by his mother's and his wife's positive experiences with faith healers: No one doubts—certainly not I—that the mind exercises a powerful influence over the body. From the beginning of time, the sorcerer, the interpreter of dreams, the fortuneteller, the charlatan, the quack, the wild medicine-man, the educated physician, the mesmerist, and the hypnotist, have made use of the client's imagination to help them in their work. They have all recognized the potency and availability of that force. Physicians cure many patients with a bread pill; they know that where the disease is only a fancy, the patient's confidence in the doctor will make the bread pill effective. Faith in the doctor. Perhaps that is the entire thing. It seems to look like it.
In stating his opposition to government intervention in health care, Twain warned that the mania for giving the government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivalry of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose that independence of thought and action which is the cause of much or our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in fine, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise.
Twain had no difficulty describing the shortcomings of each of the various medical approaches available in this unregulated era. Allopathic medicine was notable for its heroic and toxic treatments.
If a citizen was inclined to take salts by the ton, ipecac by the barrel, mercury by the quart, or quinine by the load, and thus be cured of his ailment or his sublunary existence by the wholesale, he was at perfect liberty to invite the services of a medicus of the allopathic style...
Homeopathic medicine, using infinitely small and diluted doses of agents that mimicked the disease being treated was the essence of non-therapy.
If another citizen preferred to toy with death, and buy health in small parcels, to bribe death with a sugar pill to stay away, or go to the grave with all the original sweeteners undrenched out of him, then the individual adopted the "like cures like" system, and called in a homeopath physician as being a pleasant friend of death's.
Alternative approaches, such as hydropathic medicine, appeared equally ineffective.
Citizens there were too, who liked to be washed into eternity, or soaked like over-salt mackerel before they were placed on purgatorial gridirons, and these, "of every rank and degree", had the right to pass their few remaining days in an element that they were not likely to see much of for some time.
Twain was intrigued by those who combined features of all of the available treatment programs.
Then again there were those who saw "good in everything" and who believed that whatever is is right, and these last mixed the allopathic, homeopathic, and hydropathic systems, qualified each with each, and thus passed to their long homes, drenched, pickled, sweetened, and soaked.
All of this and more, including comparisons of Twain's opinion and Flexner, at http://www.acponline.org/journals/annals/15jan97/mtwain.htm from
The Pre-Flexnerian Reports: Mark Twain's Criticism of Medicine in the United States
Annals of Internal Medicine, 15 January 1997. 126:157-163.
K. Patrick Ober, MD
Mark Twain understood the importance of a Christian's responsibility as
a citizen. He wrote, "A Christian's first duty is to God. It then
follows, as a matter of course, that it is his duty to carry his
Christian code to the polls and vote them... If Christians should vote
their duty to God at the polls, they would carry every election, and do
it with ease... it would bring about a moral revolution that would be
incalculably beneficent. It would save the country."