he
doltish materialism of the laboratories as the uncultured world outside.
But being an idle house it was a hypochondriacal house, always running
after cures. It would stop eating meat, not on valid Shelleyan grounds,
but in order to get rid of a bogey called Uric Acid; and it would
actually let you pull all its teeth out to exorcise another demon
named Pyorrhea. It was superstitious, and addicted to table-rapping,
materialization seances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the
like to such an extent that it may be doubted whether ever before in
the history of the world did soothsayers, astrologers, and unregistered
therapeutic specialists of all sorts flourish as they did during this
half century of the drift to the abyss. The registered doctors and
surgeons were hard put to it to compete with the unregistered. They were
not clever enough to appeal to the imagination and sociability of
the Heartbreakers by the arts of the actor, the orator, the poet, the
winning conversationalist. They had to fall back coarsely on the terror
of infection and death. They prescribed inoculations and operations.
Whatever part of a human being could be cut out without necessarily
killing him they cut out; and he often died (unnecessarily of course)
in consequence. From such trifles as uvulas and tonsils they went on
to ovaries and appendices until at last no one's inside was safe. They
explained that the human intestine was too long, and that nothing could
make a child of Adam healthy except short circuiting the pylorus by
cutting a length out of the lower intestine and fastening it directly to
the stomach. As their mechanist theory taught them that medicine was
the business of the chemist's laboratory, and surgery of the carpenter's
shop, and also that Science (by which they meant their practices) was
so important that no consideration for the interests of any individual
creature, whether frog or philosopher, much less the vulgar commonplaces
of sentimental ethics, could weigh for a moment against the remotest
off-chance of an addition to the body of scientific knowledge, they
operated and vivisected and inoculated and lied on a stupendous scale,
clamoring for and actually acquiring such legal powers over the bodies
of their fellow-citizens as neither king, pope, nor parliament dare ever
have claimed. The Inquisition itself was a Liberal institution compared
to the General Medical Council.

Those who do not know how to live