[drew1]

Original thread had a paragraph describing how Rockefeller greatly changed the medical system. He wanted to get rid of quack doctors and snake oil peddlers. He pushed for the AMA to regulate, having fewer doctors who came from certified medical schools.

jvl gave the link below:
https://meridianhealthclinic.com/how-rockefeller-created-the-business-of-western-medicine/

Considering the state of medical treatment nowadays, I emailed the link to my sister who is a doctor for her opinion. I reminded her that Pappy, our Great Grandaddy had been President of SC AMA in late 1920s?, although we only know him through pictures and stories. Following is her reply that I asked for permission to post.

This is really interesting. My senior project in medical school was on Herbal Medicine. I did not come across or put together this angle on the history. I did a rotation in Banner Elk and some local research on Native American practices and about Wilcox Emporium based out of Boone. In the 1800s and 1900s it was one of the largest suppliers of botanicals in the world, as I recall. Anyone could make some money wildcrafting to collect specimens in woods and fields to sell. Church groups and families across the Appalachians and Ozarks raised funds by selling what grew naturally around them.


I didn’t remember that about Pappy as head of SC AMA. I wonder what he thought about herbal treatments. In that speech he gave about cancer, he sought to dispel myths in common beliefs that cause harm through delaying treatment, but he recognized the legitimate source of fear that led to those beliefs, without belittling or disparaging people for holding them. Most of what he explained then is just as pertinent and still accurate today. I imagine he took the same inclusive view on natural, herbal and prescription treatments. But I also remember Grandmother had a great trust in prescription medicines.


When I was in medical school, a pathologist who was in his 80’s at the time, taught the history of medicine course. I don’t remember hearing of this background on Rockefeller’s motives there either, but he had early movies of the professors in medicine at University of Maryland, which later became Johns Hopkins, who were ground-breaking researchers in microbiology and chemistry in the late 1800s, early 1900s. I realized those men would have been Pappy’s professors. He was at the University of Maryland during the years that these discoveries were being made and taught. The gold medallion prize he was awarded as “Man of the Year” is at mom’s.


That story about Pappy surprising the Yankee doctors at the WWI military hospital in Greenville with his diagnosis of a mysterious condition as yellow fever or hookworm (whichever it actually was—different versions of the story exist) would have been in the time period when those prejudices were being purposely encouraged to discredit the older methods of diagnosis and treatment. The other doctors thought he was a country rube, but he had both knowledge of country living and of the advances in biological sciences. As well as understanding of human nature and love for people.


I’ve seen a similar tracking of historical motivations for profit about William Randolph Hearst (Dad talked about family links through the Presslys to the Hearsts) in discrediting cannabis use. Cannabis was definitely one of those herbal healing agents. That theory also fits within the same time period as Rockefeller’s agenda. The movie “Reefer Madness” was supposedly part of the propaganda campaign to eliminate hemp as a source for paper in Hearst’s vertically organized business investments in timber and newspapers. And fan the flame of racial tensions and mistrust for dark-skinned people. Our troubles grow from these roots.



“Harry Anslinger, the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, authored the Marijuana Tax Act legislation passed by Congress in August 1937. Anslinger and William Randolph Hearst, of media empire and Central California coastal castle fame, created a cannabis smear campaign whose effects still can be felt today. Hearst’s magazines and newspapers served as the perfect propaganda outlets for Anslinger’s sensational, racist, and fictional stories of cannabis driving Americans of color to race mixing, murder, rape, and the insane asylum.”

“From the vantage point of hindsight being 20/20, history books give the following very simplified reasons for the smear campaign. For government employee Anslinger, Prohibition ended in 1933, and he needed to justify his job. Plus, he was a big fat racist. For tycoon Hearst, it was retribution for Pancho Villa’s army seizing 800,000 acres and one of his ranches during the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s. (Pancho Villa’s army had the reputation of partaking in cannabis.) It is also theorized that Hearst, a timber magnate, too, had financial incentive to make sure hemp was cleared from the landscape.” —excerpt from Santa Barbara Independent



From my experience here, working on a vision to organize as a community to use knowledge and resources in an efficient snd effective, low cost way, it is next to impossible to either get people in government to listen, understand, and trust local expertise or to get corporate actors to move out of their silos of ownership and profit. Meanwhile, our elected governments direct their agents to use taxpayer’s money to repay the corporate conglomerates who get them elected. And people also seem to trust rapacious conglomerates of billionaire magnates to look out for their personal interests more than they trust professionals who come from the same places snd background as they do.

Thanks for sending that. It puts things in a helpful perspective.