People v. Willis

BURNETT, J.

The defendant was convicted under an information charging that he “did willfully and unlawfully practice a system and mode of treating the sick and afflicted in the State of California, without then and there having a valid unrevoked certifícate of license from the Board of Medical Examiners of the State of California so to do.” The statute (sec. 17, Stats, of 1917, p. 114) provides: “Any person who shall practice or attempt to practice or who advertises or holds himself out as practicing any system or* mode of treating the sick or afflicted in this state, or who shall diagnose, treat, operate for, or prescribe for, any disease, injury, deformity, or other mental or physical condition of any person without having at the time of so doing a valid unrevoked certificate as provided in this act, . . . shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction therefor shall be punished as designated in this act.”

No attack is made upon the validity of the statute, but the claim of appellant is that in following his peculiar mode of treatment he is not subject to its provisions. His brief contains an interesting and illuminating discussion of the philosophy and technique of the chiropractic system, but

[718]

we perceive therein no reason for exempting such practitioners from the requirements of this wholesome law, designed, as it is, “to protect both the individual and the public from the dangers and evils which might result from treatment by those not possessing the knowledge and skill requisite in the treatment of diseases with which mankind is afflicted.’’

(People

v.

Jordan,

172 Cal. 391 [156 Pac. 451].)

The general trend of appellant’s contention may be disclosed by the following quotation from his brief: “The science of chiropractic is separate and distinct from the science of medicine and surgery and from all other known forms of what is generally termed ‘drugless practice.’ The particular difference consists in two things; first, excepting the science of chiropractic, each and every other science having to do with improvement or benefits to the human body, bases its effects upon an attempt to heal the body or to cure the body and may therefore be generally referred to as a therapeutical science as contradistinguished from the science of chiropractic, which makes no claim to being a science or art of healing the body or treating the diseases of the body. ... In the second place, chiropractic differs from the so-called therapeutical sciences in this: That chiropractic does not recognize disease as an entity, and consequently it cannot treat diseases, nor men nor women for diseases. Chiropractic only aims to establish and maintain the normal function of the * tissues of the body by permitting a normal transmission of nerve energy to take place between the nerve centers and the general tissues of the body. The present Medical Practice Act in the state of California never did, does not, and never will apply to chiropractors, because the legislature that enacted it, and the act itself expresses nothing but therapeutic language. The very prohibition contained in the penalizing part of the Medical Practice Act provides ‘that every person who practices any mode or system of treating the sick or afflicted,’ except as therein provided shall be punished, etc.”