c., etc., etc.: all these discrepancies arising not between
the opinion of good doctors and bad ones (the medical contention is,
of course, that a bad doctor is an impossibility), but between
practitioners of equal eminence and authority. Usually it is impossible
to persuade the jury that these facts are facts. Juries seldom notice
facts; and they have been taught to regard any doubts of the omniscience
and omnipotence of doctors as blasphemy. Even the fact that doctors
themselves die of the very diseases they profess to cure passes
unnoticed. We do not shoot out our lips and shake our heads, saying,
"They save others: themselves they cannot save": their reputation
stands, like an African king's palace, on a foundation of dead bodies;
and the result is that the verdict goes against the defendant when the
defendant is a doctor accused of malpractice.

Fortunately for the doctors, they very seldom find themselves in this
position, because it is so difficult to prove anything against them. The
only evidence that can decide a case of malpractice is expert evidence:
that is, the evidence of other doctors; and every doctor will allow a
colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond
of professional etiquet by giving him away. It is the nurse who gives
the doctor away in private, because every nurse has some particular
doctor whom she likes; and she usually assures her patients that all the
others are disastrous noodles, and soothes the tedium of the sick-bed
by gossip about their blunders. She will even give a doctor away for the
sake of making the patient believe that she knows more than the doctor.
But she dare not, for her livelihood, give the doctor away in public.
And the doctors stand by one another at all costs. Now and then some
doctor in an unassailable position, like the late Sir William Gull, will
go into the witness box and say what he really thinks about the way a
patient has been treated; but such behavior is considered little short
of infamous by his colleagues.

WHY DOCTORS DO NOT DIFFER

The truth is, there would never be any public agreement among doctors if
they did not agree to agree on the main point of the doctor being always
in the right. Yet the two guinea man never thinks that the five shilling
man is right: if he did, he would be understood as confessing to an
overcharge of one pound seventeen shillings; and on the same ground
the five shilling man cannot encourage the