aberrations
which turns some men and women to medicine and surgery is not sometimes
as morbid as the interest in misery and vice which turns some others
to philanthropy and "rescue work." But the true doctor is inspired by
a hatred of ill-health, and a divine impatience of any waste of vital
forces. Unless a man is led to medicine or surgery through a very
exceptional technical aptitude, or because doctoring is a family
tradition, or because he regards it unintelligently as a lucrative and
gentlemanly profession, his motives in choosing the career of a healer
are clearly generous. However actual practice may disillusion and
corrupt him, his selection in the first instance is not a selection of a
base character.

THE DOCTOR'S HARDSHIPS

A review of the counts in the indictment I have brought against private
medical practice will show that they arise out of the doctor's position
as a competitive private tradesman: that is, out of his poverty and
dependence. And it should be borne in mind that doctors are expected
to treat other people specially well whilst themselves submitting
to specially inconsiderate treatment. The butcher and baker are not
expected to feed the hungry unless the hungry can pay; but a doctor who
allows a fellow-creature to suffer or perish without aid is regarded as
a monster. Even if we must dismiss hospital service as really venal,
the fact remains that most doctors do a good deal of gratuitous work
in private practice all through their careers. And in his paid work the
doctor is on a different footing to the tradesman. Although the articles
he sells, advice and treatment, are the same for all classes, his fees
have to be graduated like the income tax. The successful fashionable
doctor may weed his poorer patients out from time to time, and finally
use the College of Physicians to place it out of his own power to accept
low fees; but the ordinary general practitioner never makes out his
bills without considering the taxable capacity of his patients.

Then there is the disregard of his own health and comfort which results
from the fact that he is, by the nature of his work, an emergency man.
We are polite and considerate to the doctor when there is nothing the
matter, and we meet him as a friend or entertain him as a guest; but
when the baby is suffering from croup, or its mother has a temperature
of 104 degrees, or its grandfather has broken his leg, nobody thinks
of the doctor except as a