followers were frantically persecuted
for a century by generations of apothecary-doctors whose incomes
depended on the quantity of drugs they could induce their patients to
swallow. These two cases of ordinary vaccination and homeopathy are
typical of all the rest. Just as the object of a trade union under
existing conditions must finally be, not to improve the technical
quality of the work done by its members, but to secure a living wage
for them, so the object of the medical profession today is to secure an
income for the private doctor; and to this consideration all concern for
science and public health must give way when the two come into conflict.
Fortunately they are not always in conflict. Up to a certain point
doctors, like carpenters and masons, must earn their living by doing the
work that the public wants from them; and as it is not in the nature
of things possible that such public want should be based on unmixed
disutility, it may be admitted that doctors have their uses, real as
well as imaginary. But just as the best carpenter or mason will resist
the introduction of a machine that is likely to throw him out of work,
or the public technical education of unskilled laborers' sons to compete
with him, so the doctor will resist with all his powers of persecution
every advance of science that threatens his income. And as the advance
of scientific hygiene tends to make the private doctor's visits rarer,
and the public inspector's frequenter, whilst the advance of scientific
therapeutics is in the direction of treatments that involve highly
organized laboratories, hospitals, and public institutions generally, it
unluckily happens that the organization of private practitioners which
we call the medical profession is coming more and more to represent, not
science, but desperate and embittered antiscience: a statement of things
which is likely to get worse until the average doctor either depends
upon or hopes for an appointment in the public health service for his
livelihood.

So much for our guarantees as to medical science. Let us now deal with
the more painful subject of medical kindness.

DOCTORS AND VIVISECTION

The importance to our doctors of a reputation for the tenderest humanity
is so obvious, and the quantity of benevolent work actually done by them
for nothing (a great deal of it from sheer good nature) so large, that
at first sight it seems unaccountable that they should not only throw
all the