**CLPRA scripts are working drafts for recording sessions. Recorded performances may vary due to editing for broadcast.** Links key: CLP Atlas Informational (with hover) Online Books CLP Author page CLP Intern

Pierre Garnier (1819-1910) http://tinyurl.com/PGarnier

Click the below to hear radio segment.

The Healing Arts

From A Medical Journey in California, 1967.

Reader: Kevin Hearle

A perennial topic for California policy makers is what to do about health care, a topic over which one knowledgable Gold Rush observer became an early pessimist.

French physician Dr. Pierre Garnier didn't think much of the practice of the healing arts in Gold Rush California. But it wasn't just the practice of medicine he complained of, but the mercantile culture with which good health policy collided.

No law regulates the healing arts in the land of gold. The practice of medicine and pharmacy is absolutely free and unlimited, and the first comer can tape up either or both. The only limitation placed upon those operating public medical shops is the purchase of a monthly license like any other tradesmen. . . .

The spread of this easy freedom of medical practice, either by preventing or abolishing any protective or informational public action, is further abetted by another factor: the very nature of the California population. It is almost exclusively composed of foreigners of every country and nationality, ignorant of each other's customs, language, religion, tastes, and habits. They live isolated from one another, with no common ties, sharing nothing in common except the lust for gold which really only divides them the more. Then there is also the egoistic character fostered by this mercenary country, and the unstable and nomadic life which frequent and sudden changes of fortune imposes.

Dr. Pierre Garnier's recollection of California medicine was published in France in 1854 and was later translated as A Medical Journey in California.