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
the real treatment is too dear for either patient or doctor