Medical Mussolini

Washington, DC: Columbia Publishing Co., 1938. First edition.

1938 SCARCE VIRULENT DIATRIBE AGAINST THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, BY THE EDITOR OF "PLAIN TALK," A LIBERTARIAN MAGAZINE.

7 1/2 inches tall hardcover, gray cloth binding with embossed title in blue to cover and spine, copy of Rochester Anti-Vivisection Society, inscribed and hand stamped on front endpapers and embossed seal on title page. 255 pp, 12 plates, very good in good jacket with soiling and chips top of front cover and spine--protected by mylar cover. LAID IN Two clippings from Liberty newspaper referencing Medical Mussolini and the dangers of organized medicine, affixed to verso of last page of text AND a printed testimonial for the book on a perforated sticker affixed to the back endpaper.

MORRIS A BEALLE (1891-1972), from a prominent Maryland family, was editor and publisher of Plain Talk, a libertarian magazine. A pamphlet advertising Plain Talk stated that "the subjects which the new magazine will cover will range widely from birth control to municipal management; from prohibition to psychoanalysis; from national politics to public morals; medicine; crime; education; the press; the public mind." Bealle was strongly opposed to socialism, communism, and the New Deal, and became a pundit of the radical right. Medical Mussolini (offered here) is a diatribe against the American Medical Association and its leader, Dr. Morris Fishbein. It is accompanied by garish plates depicting rapacious physicians, the secretary of health as Mussolini, and MDs as Nazi troops.

PROVENANCE: It is significant that this copy of Medical Mussolini was previously purchased by the Rochester Anti-Vivisection Society. " In attempting to enact state and federal-level legislative reform, the AAVS ran up against the American Medical Association (AMA), who claimed vivisection was critical to furthering medical advances and who sought to defend their profession's recently won respectability. ... the very public campaign by the AAVS toward political reform pushed the AMA, and medicine more broadly, into the political sphere. The debate over the morality of vivisection at the beginning of the last century was thus critical to creating the politically powerful AMA of the twenty-first century."--SR Hausmann. The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 264 - 283.