ot cure him. When you have done that
over and over again every day for a week, how much scientific conscience
have you left? If you are weak-minded enough to cling desperately to
your eighteenpence as denoting a certain social superiority to the
sixpenny doctor, you will be miserably poor all your life; whilst the
sixpenny doctor, with his low prices and quick turnover of patients,
visibly makes much more than you do and kills no more people.

A doctor's character can no more stand out against such conditions than
the lungs of his patients can stand out against bad ventilation. The
only way in which he can preserve his self-respect is by forgetting
all he ever learnt of science, and clinging to such help as he can
give without cost merely by being less ignorant and more accustomed to
sick-beds than his patients. Finally, he acquires a certain skill at
nursing cases under poverty-stricken domestic conditions, just as women
who have been trained as domestic servants in some huge institution with
lifts, vacuum cleaners, electric lighting, steam heating, and machinery
that turns the kitchen into a laboratory and engine house combined,
manage, when they are sent out into the world to drudge as general
servants, to pick up their business in a new way, learning the
slatternly habits and wretched makeshifts of homes where even bundles of
kindling wood are luxuries to be anxiously economized.

THE SUCCESSFUL DOCTOR

The doctor whose success blinds public opinion to medical poverty is
almost as completely demoralized. His promotion means that his practice
becomes more and more confined to the idle rich. The proper advice for
most of their ailments is typified in Abernethy's "Live on sixpence a
day and earn it." But here, as at the other end of the scale, the right
advice is neither agreeable nor practicable. And every hypochondriacal
rich lady or gentleman who can be persuaded that he or she is a lifelong
invalid means anything from fifty to five hundred pounds a year for the
doctor. Operations enable a surgeon to earn similar sums in a couple
of hours; and if the surgeon also keeps a nursing home, he may make
considerable profits at the same time by running what is the most
expensive kind of hotel. These gains are so great that they undo much
of the moral advantage which the absence of grinding pecuniary anxiety
gives the rich doctor over the poor one. It is true that the temptation
to prescribe a sham treatment because