otherwise would be a lunatic. But mankind does not agree, and does
not know the facts. All that can be said for medical popularity is
that until there is a practicable alternative to blind trust in
the doctor, the truth about the doctor is so terrible that we dare
not face it. Moliere saw through the doctors; but he had to call
them in just the same. Napoleon had no illusions about them; but
he had to die under their treatment just as much as the most
credulous ignoramus that ever paid sixpence for a bottle of strong
medicine. In this predicament most people, to save themselves from
unbearable mistrust and misery, or from being driven by their
conscience into actual conflict with the law, fall back on the old
rule that if you cannot have what you believe in you must believe
in what you have. When your child is ill or your wife dying, and
you happen to be very fond of them, or even when, if you are not
fond of them, you are human enough to forget every personal grudge
before the spectacle of a fellow creature in pain or peril, what
you want is comfort, reassurance, something to clutch at, were it
but a straw. This the doctor brings you. You have a wildly urgent
feeling that something must be done; and the doctor does
something. Sometimes what he does kills the patient; but you do
not know that; and the doctor assures you that all that human
skill could do has been done. And nobody has the brutality to say
to the newly bereft father, mother, husband, wife, brother, or
sister, "You have killed your lost darling by your credulity."


THE PECULIAR PEOPLE

Besides, the calling in of the doctor is now compulsory except in
cases where the patient is an adult--and not too ill to decide the