I presume nobody will question the existence of widely spread
popular delusion that every doctor is a titan of science. It is
escaped only in the very small class which understands by science
something more than conjuring with retorts and spirit lamps,
magnets and microscopes, and discovering magical cures for
disease. To a sufficiently ignorant man every captain of a
trading schooner is a Galileo, every organ-grinder a Beethoven,
every piano-tuner a Hemholtz, every Old Bailey barrister a Solon,
every Seven Dials pigeon dealer a Darwin, every scrivener a
Shakespear, every locomotive engine a miracle, and its driver no
less wonderful than George Stephenson. As a matter of fact, the
rank and file of doctors are no more scientific than their
tailors; or, if you prefer to put it the reverse way, their
tailors are no less scientific than they. Doctoring is an art,
not a science: any layman who is interested in science
sufficiently to take in one of the scientific journals and follow
the literature of the scientific movement, knows more about it
than those doctors (probably a large majority) who are not
interested in it, and practise only to earn their bread.
Doctoring is not even the art of keeping people in health (no
doctor seems able to advise you what to eat any better than his
grandmother or the nearest quack): it is the art of curing
illnesses. It does happen exceptionally that a practising doctor
makes a contribution to science (my play describes a very notable
one); but it happens much oftener that he draws disastrous
conclusions from his clinical experience because he has no
conception of scientific method, and believes, like any rustic,
that the handling of evidence and statistics needs no expertness.
The distinction between a quack doctor and a qualified one is
mainly that only the qualified one is authorized to sign death
certificates, for which both sorts seem to have about equal
occasion. Unqualified practitioners now make large incomes as
hygienists, and are resorted to as frequently by cultivated
amateur scientists who understand quite well what they are doing
as by ignorant people who are simply dupes. Bone-setters make
fortunes under the very noses of our greatest surgeons from
educated and wealthy patients; and some of the most successful
doctors on the register use quite heretical methods of treating
disease, and have qualified themselves solely for convenience.
Leaving out of account the village witches who prescribe spells
and sell charms, the humblest professional healers in this
country are the herbalists. These men wander through the fields
on Sunday seeking for herbs with magic properties of curing
disease, preventing childbirth, and the like. Each of them
believes that he is on the verge of a great discovery, in which
Virginia Snake Root will be an ingredient, heaven knows why!
Virginia Snake Root fascinates the imagination of the herbalist
as mercury used to fascinate the alchemists. On week days he
keeps a shop in which he sells packets of pennyroyal, dandelion,
etc., labelled with little lists of the diseases they are
supposed to cure, and apparently do cure to the satisfaction of
the people who keep on buying them. I have never been able to
perceive any distinction between the science of the herbalist and
that of the duly registered doctor. A relative of mine recently
consulted a doctor about some of the ordinary symptoms which
indicate the need for a holiday and a change. The doctor
satisfied himself that the patient's heart was a little
depressed. Digitalis being a drug labelled as a heart specific
by the profession, he promptly administered a stiff dose.
Fortunately the patient was a hardy old lady who was not easily
killed. She recovered with no worse result than her conversion to
Christian Science, which owes its vogue quite as much to public
despair of doctors as to superstition. I am not, observe, here
concerned with the question as to whether the dose of digitalis
was judicious or not; the point is, that a farm laborer
consulting a herbalist would have been treated in exactly the
same way.
