his throat, or has a pain in his inside. If a doctor effects some
trumpery cure with a wet compress or a peppermint lozenge nobody
takes the least notice of him. But if he operates on the throat
and kills the patient, or extirpates an internal organ and keeps
the whole nation palpitating for days whilst the patient hovers in
pain and fever between life and death, his fortune is made: every
rich man who omits to call him in when the same symptoms appear in
his household is held not to have done his utmost duty to the
patient. The wonder is that there is a king or queen left alive in
Europe.


DOCTOR'S CONSCIENCES

There is another difficulty in trusting to the honor and
conscience of a doctor. Doctors are just like other Englishmen:
most of them have no honor and no conscience: what they commonly
mistake for these is sentimentality and an intense dread of doing
anything that everybody else does not do, or omitting to do
anything that everybody else does. This of course does amount to a
sort of working or rule-of-thumb conscience; but it means that you
will do anything, good or bad, provided you get enough people to
keep you in countenance by doing it also. It is the sort of
conscience that makes it possible to keep order on a pirate ship,
or in a troop of brigands. It may be said that in the last
analysis there is no other sort of honor or conscience in
existence--that the assent of the majority is the only sanction
known to ethics. No doubt this holds good in political practice.
If mankind knew the facts, and agreed with the doctors, then the
doctors would be in the right; and any person who thought