In Ontario, provision is made for the registration of Homœopathists as well as of regular practitioners, and for the Eclectics who were practising in the Province for six years before 1874. A physician practising in another country, and performing medical services for a patient then residing there, may recover his fees in this Province notwithstanding he is not |47| registered [98]. A medical practitioner duly registered in England, under the Imperial Act, is entitled in Ontario to registration upon payment of fees without examination [99]. In the United States, the common law doctrine, which favours the right of every man to practise in any profession or business in which he is competent, prevails to a great extent; and medicine being regarded by it as an honorific profession, no apprenticeship was required, but the practitioner always prescribed at his peril. This was also the doctrine of the civil law, which drew no barriers around either law or medicine. Any one who pleased might practise them without any previous qualification; subject always to responsibility for injury inflicted upon others. In the absence of any statutes, therefore, limiting the common law right to practise medicine inherent in every person, the term physician may there be applied to any one who publicly announces himself to be a practitioner of the art and undertakes to treat the sick, either for or without reward. The common law knows nothing of systems or schools of medicine. In its eyes, Eclectic, Botanic, Physio-Medical, Electrical, Thompsonian, Homœopath, Reformed, Indian Doctor, Cancer Doctor, Indianopathist, Clairvoyant Doctor and regular physician are alike. The scales of justice are no more affected by the large doses of the allopathist than by the infinitesimal supplies of the homœopathist. But the law will sometimes interfere where one not pretending to be a practising physician uses a peculiar system in his own family. A father, during the sickness of his children and wife, refused to provide any medical treatment, except that applied by himself, called the Baunscheidt system, which consists in pricking the skin of the patient in different parts of the body with an instrument armed with |48| a number of needles and operated by a spring, and then rubbing the parts affected with an irritating oil. The wife and three children had died within a month. The man practised the exanthematic treatment upon them, but did not even call in physicians who used that mode. The Superior Court of Pennsylvania deprived this believer in the Baunscheidt panacea of the custody of his surviving children [100].