Dr. O'DONOVAN. The part that you read is not so strong in that behalf as another part of the bill, if you will allow me a moment to find it. In section 9, Senator, on page 7, in lines 5 and 6, if you will read it, you will find that

In order to provide popular nontechnical instruction to the residents of the various States, particularly to those to whom such facilities are not accessible, on the subject of the hygiene of infancy, hygiene of maternity, and related subjects.

Suppose that you are a mere man, you might not know what "related subjects" may mean. That is left entirely to the discretion. of the visitor, who is sent abroad to teach the people nontechnical instruction. 'Related subjects" means what? It is a very vague term, and I can readily understand when an enthusiast could inject that into her teachings

Senator PHIPPS. I think that section 9 as stated relates to the authorization to arrange with any educational institution for the provision of extension courses by qualified lecturers. That would be my interpretation of that. I do not think that that is meant at all. Dr. O'DONOVAN. It says, "related subjects," which is a very vague expression, Senator.

Senator WOLCOTT. Can you imagine anyone going around and advising people as a lecturer, and teaching birth control? I can't imagine any such thing.

Dr. O'DONOVAN. You perhaps may not know what was stated on the streets of New York, and by the women distributing the pamphlets. But I am talking merely with respect to this bill and I thank you for your consideration.

Mrs. KILBRETH. Is Dr. Dobbin, of Maryland, in the room?
Dr. O'DONOVAN. I do not see him.

Mrs. KILBRETн. Will you allow me to say a few words in connection with that?

The CHAIRMAN. Yes.

Mrs. KILBRETH. The occasion referred to in New York was most disgraceful, and the speakers were mobbed, and young people were pushed off the platform there at Carnegie Hall, they rushed up on the platform at Carnegie Hall

Senator PHIPPS. What year was that?

Mrs. KILBRETH. That was about three years ago, 1917, I think. Some of the speakers were so terrified that one or two women had to take cover and get away. There was a perfect mob clamoring upon the platform, so I am told-I was not present in person-but they were chiefly young boys and girls. It was nothing but curiosity. Senator PHIPPS. May I ask

Mrs. KILBRETH. I can get the exact data about that if you want it. Senator PHIPPS. And do you think that this would permit the teaching of birth control?

Mrs. KILBRETH. Absolutely. But I happen to be very imperfectly situated in order to answer it.

Now, will you allow me, please, to make just a short statement, in regard to this part of the testimony of the head of the Children's Bureau, the chief of the Child's Bureau in connection with social study that Dr. Quessy spoke of. That is in the report published of a previous hearing. That is a part of the remarks of Miss Lathrop. The CHAIRMAN. What hearing was that?

Mrs. KILBRETH. The house hearing, on December 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, 29, 1920.

The CHAIRMAN. In relation to what bill?

Mrs. KILBRETH. This bill. I would like to read this:

Miss LATHROP. My judgment is that it is not altogether a health consideration. The inquiries that led up to it were not medical, but were chiefly in the social and economic fields. And the principles to be applied in administering this law are largely in the social and economic fields, and it is not a health measure in the sense in which the prevention or cure or treatment of disease is a health measure. It is largely a matter of straight popularization; it belongs in its health aspect to that field of hygiene which the doctors have long since discovered and turned over to the laity to practice.

Then again:

Miss LATHROP. Well, Mr. Chairman, I should regard it as a fatal error to transfer a bureau whose business it is "to investigate and report upon all matters relating to the welfare of children and child life" to the sole supervision of physicians, earnestly as I may respect physicians.

I am sorry to take up the time of this committee, but I consider this very important. Miss Lathrop on that day said:

Mr. WINSLOW. Well, you did draw in a medical branch to your office when you went into this field?

Miss LATHROP. Yes; we did draw in medical advisers later when we had more money. We are aware that there are aspects of life which require the services of physicians, but they are a small part of child welfare and must be considered in relation to the social field.

Mr. WINSLOW. Granting that it means a social field, is this not specifically a medical proposition?

Miss LATHROP. I do not so regard it; and I am sure any one who had time to read the successive reports of the bureau upon infant mortality would not feel that this bureau was primarily a medical proposition. I think that it is a social and economic proposition, and we can not ignore those basic aspects of it without doing great violence to the value of whatever medical work is indicated.

That is what I would like to have incorporated, please, in substantiation of what Dr. Quessy has said. If you desire more specific reports about that meeting in Carnegie Hall, I can supply them. The CHAIRMAN. You have other witnesses?

Mrs. KILBRETH. Yes; we will have another witness; and I would like to have read that letter addressed to the chairman of this committee, if Dr. Quessy will read it. There are 16 very prominent Boston physicians signing that letter.

The CHAIRMAN. It may be filed with the committee.

(Thereupon, at 12 o'clock, a recess was taken until 2.30 p. m. of the same day.)

AFTER RECESS.

The committee met at 2.30 o'clock p. m., pursuant to recess.

STATEMENT OF MRS. JESSICA HENDERSON, BOSTON, MASS., SECRETARY OF THE MEDICAL LIBERTY LEAGUE (Inc.).

The CHAIRMAN. Your name is?

Mrs. HENDERSON. Mrs. Jessica Henderson.

The CHAIRMAN. And whom do you represent, madam?

Mrs. HENDERSON. I represent the Medical Liberty League (Inc.). The CHAIRMAN. What is the Medical Liberty League (Inc.)? Mrs. HENDERSON. It is a league to secure medical freedom on the same basis and with the constitutional guaranty as religious free

dom or religious liberty, and we have upward of 2,000 members, and we are opposed to this Sheppard-Towner bill because it is one of the twenty-odd bills now before Congress that creates and intrenches the control of State medicine, and we believe, with Herbert Spencer, that medical liberty is just as important as religious liberty.

The CHAIRMAN. Is this league in any way connected with the Christian Scientists?

Mrs. HENDERSON. No, sir; but we have Christian Scientists with us, and we have 18 physicians on our honorary vice presidents' list. and we have four physicians of the seven on the executive committee. The CHAIRMAN. And is it opposed to medicine and doctors and things of that kind?

Mrs. HENDERSON. Why, 18 of those on our honorary vice presidents' list are doctors, and I think that that answers the question for me. But we do not want our doctors chosen by the State, and we do not want to be forced to have State aid medicine any more than we want to be forced to have State religion.

The CHAIRMAN. Are you opposed to quarantine, and such as that? Mrs. HENDERSON. No, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. And are you opposed to vaccination?

Mrs. HENDERSON. We are opposed to compulsory vaccination, yes, sir; because that is choosing our physician for us. Our physicians are opposed to compulsory vaccination, and therefore if the State chooses any physician that it wishes and forces it upon us, or if it forces State medicine upon us, we oppose it. We do not wish

it to be enforced upon us.

About this bill, there has been a great deal said about the indorsement by this, that, and the other organization. I have spent the past year going to many parts of the State and speaking in opposition to the bill, and I have been present at many meetings where the indorsement for this legislation, or the so-called indorsement, was made. We will take first the League of Women Voters, of which I am a member-and this is not said in criticism of the League of Women Voters, which was organized for suffrage. After we secured suffrage, our executive took up many other subjects. It was quite one thing for the executive to indorse measures when they were organized for suffrage, but when that was won it was quite another thing for the executive to take up a hundred and one different things and indorse them.

It means very little for a league composed of so many members to indorse anything through its executive, for in our league we have hundreds and hundreds of members of the League of Women Voters, so that you can see that the League of Women Voters as a whole did not indorse it. Their executive does indorse it. The Parent-Teachers' Association-I have come to question whether this is wise and good and true legislation for instance, the Parent-Teachers' Association in indorsing it would call a meeting for the purpose of indorsing it, and they would ask the people there if they wished to indorse the bill, just stating the purpose of the bill, and in many instances there was no bill present which the members could read or which the members could see, and the bill was not read to them. In several instances, several occasions that have come before my persona! observation, that has been the method. So those indorsements mean very little, and I question the motive underlying this legisla tion if they use such means to promote it.

Then, in our State, we had a maternity benefit bill drawn up by a physician, and you people here in Washington may have heard a good deal about it, because it created a great deal of talk at the time, and Miss Edna Spencer drew up the bill, and it was for cash benefits, endowment of maternity. I will say that the then governor of Massachusetts seemed entirely favorable to that bill, and I talked with Miss Spencer before coming to Boston, and she said that she thought she had the governor's hearty support, and finally it came to pass that he appointed a commission which made a report that was discussed this morning, and I think that the governor must have had some anæsthetic from some source when he appointed that commission, for the reason that he appointed Alfred Worcester, president of the Massachusetts Medical Society, as one of the members, and he also appointed Eugene R. Kelly, of the State board of health, commissioner of health, and then he appointed Mrs. McDonald, the one lone woman that was appointed, and they are all of the old school, and they are all dominated by that school of medicine, and she was a doctor's wife, so that the commission means just absolutely what they wanted it to mean. There was no show for anyone who had anything to say or any desire for medical liberty. Now, we criticize that, and you were speaking of the figures presented about the reduction of mortality in maternity cases, which Dr. Quessy cited, as not having proven values. I was speaking on the same platform with Dr. Quessy the first time that I ever saw him in Winchester; I was speaking in opposition to a bill, and he was speaking in opposition to this bill. Dr. Champion, of Harvard, presented these wonderful figures from New York, what this maternal care by physicians had done in reducing the mortality in maternity in New York, and Dr. Quessy asked Dr. Champion-it was a perfectly well-meaning question-where those figures could be found, and Dr. Champion replied that they made them up for themselves and that they were the best that could be had. Dr. Quessy remarked that that was what he thought. Under those circumstances, repeated over and over again, these same experiences, we have come to feel that some one is not playing fair, and we are opposed to the bill.

We are in favor of a maternity benefit and an endowment bill, such as Miss Spencer brought forward, where women may choose their own visitors, and Miss Spencer allowed me to bring the message to your committee that she was opposed to any legislation which did not permit the woman to choose her own physician.

I would like to say that the Wassermann test has been taken up before you, that it has fallen down completely, and that it has rapidly fallen into disrepute, and that I can present evidence of laboratory experts in regard to that. One laboratory expert has been in the largest laboratory-one of the largest laboratories in New York Cityfor twenty years, and when he was questioned about the Wassermann test he said this expert said that he had no confidence in the Wassermann test, and they would not want to see anyone treated as syphilitic because of that. Dr. Williams of Johns Hopkins University said that they would prefer not to have this on all women. Now, while this bill makes no mention of the compulsory feature, anyone knows the treatment of women under this bill will be so near compulsory that no one could tell the difference.

47819-21-8

Now, about boards of health, I know our own state board of health from A to Z, and I believe that they are the lowest group of men in the medical profession. Of course there may be exceptions, and I know that the doctors don't like to hear this, nor say anything about it, but being a lay-woman, I can say it myself. It has been my experience that they are the outcasts of the medical profession, the most unscrupulous men in the medical profession, and to put this great responsibility of the protection of women in the care of boards of health would be a most unjust procedure. We would not want it ourselves. There is not a woman who would want it in this whole room, and I would like to ask if there is appearing before your committee one single woman who would be affected by this legislation! I am quite sure that you will have to answer in the negative.

I dislike extremely legislation for people who are going to be affected most by it when they have no voice in shaping or choosing or enacting that legislation. I think that it is absolutely un-American and I think that it violates the fourteenth amendment of our Constitution.

I would like to say that we grant that there are too many deaths among pregnant women and too many deaths of young children before the age of one year and all the way along through their childhood, but I am convinced that this legislation would not lessen it in any way, shape, or form. I think that no one has any right to put upon these defenseless women something that they would not wish to submit to themselves. I am a mother of six children, and I am a grandmother, and I know exactly what I am talking about. I live and work among the poorer classes, and I know that they are intelligent about their rights, and that they know what they want. They will come here and tell you that there are 17 other countries that have lower death rates than we, and we have from one to ten times as much medical attendance as prevails in those countries, and I think that that alone shows that the medical attendance is not at the bottom of this high mortality. The president of our medical league— The CHAIRMAN. That is rather tough on the doctors.

me.

Mrs. HENDERSON. I was just going to say what a doctor said to Horace Gray, of Boston, just the day before I came here, in conversation with me, told me that he thought that our statistics were far too slender-mark the word-I think it is a splendid expression to act upon. I think that the physicians and the boards. of health should work upon quarantine and sanitary measures and all that sort of thing and not go out and attack the personal liberties of the community.

Our president, who is a physician, Mr. S. Mason Padeford, of Fall River, Mass., a busy and a practicing physician, says that he is perfectly sure that the high maternity death rate--if it is high-and we are not all perfectly convinced that it is-but if it is high-that this death rate among the children is high, and he is perfectly convinced in his practice of many, many years that it is due to economic conditions and not due to the lack of medical attendance. Then, too, many other physicians with whom I have talked in regard to the matter bear out that statement, that it is entirely due to the economic conditions. The expectant mothers do not have the right food, they do not have the right place to live, they are overcrowded, and they live in unsanitary conditions, and they have no time or place to rest,