Lecture: History and Development of Processes–Question and Answer Period (1954)

Now, we take medicine today. The general practitioner is getting so rare that they even write full feature-length stories about him in Look magazine. He’s getting this rare. One he found was found to exist in the middle of New York City and they wrote this whole article about him. Old Doctor Pottenger, the very great old man of tuberculosis, who has startled the medical profession many, many times by simply going up to somebody and putting his hand on the fellow’s chest and saying, “Gh, my, two spots!” and so forth. Unassisted by x-rays or anything else, diagnosed it. By the way, they put-this was-got to be such a hot point in the medical profession, they put up twenty-five people with or without and with varying degrees of tuberculosis on a stage before a medical conference and old Doc Pottenger went down the whole line, simply put his hands on their chests, one after the other, and diagnosed exactly-corroborated by x-rays-and exceeding x-rays to this degree: he wrote down the length of time each one of the people had left, you see, if he had tuberculosis. And his prognostication of two of the cases was exactly accurate, whereas all other prognostications were wrong on it. In other words, he was doing a better job simply by touching their chests. This old man said to me one time-I knew him, he was a nice guy-he said to me one time, he said: “The trouble with the medical profession today is specialization.” He said, “It’s all I can do,” he said, “to put up with this ridiculous position in which I find myself of being an expert and a specialist in tuberculosis.” The old man could whittle up tibias and carve out appendixes and cure sinusitis and do a lot of other things, you see, but the public pressure on the subject of tuberculosis simply kept him anchored in that particular field.¹, ²

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