and mischievous operating is bound to go on, and that patients
are encouraged to imagine that modern surgery and anesthesia have
made operations much less serious matters than they really are?
When doctors write or speak to the public about operations, they
imply, and often say in so many words, that chloroform has made
surgery painless. People who have been operated on know better.
The patient does not feel the knife, and the operation is
therefore enormously facilitated for the surgeon; but the patient
pays for the anesthesia with hours of wretched sickness; and when
that is over there is the pain of the wound made by the surgeon,
which has to heal like any other wound. This is why operating
surgeons, who are usually out of the house with their fee in
their pockets before the patient has recovered consciousness, and
who therefore see nothing of the suffering witnessed by the
general practitioner and the nurse, occasionally talk of
operations very much as the hangman in Barnaby Rudge talked of
executions, as if being operated on were a luxury in sensation as
well as in price.


MEDICAL POVERTY

To make matters worse, doctors are hideously poor. The Irish
gentleman doctor of my boyhood, who took nothing less than a
guinea, though he might pay you four visits for it, seems to have
no equivalent nowadays in English society. Better be a railway
porter than an ordinary English general practitioner. A railway
porter has from eighteen to twenty-three shillings a week from
the Company merely as a retainer; and his additional fees from
the public, if we leave the third-class twopenny tip out of