possibility of leaving to sentence one prisoner (under the
Blasphemy laws) for questioning the authority of Scripture, and
another for ignorantly and superstitiously accepting it as a guide
to conduct. To-day all this is changed. The doctor never hesitates
to claim divine omniscience, nor to clamor for laws to punish any
scepticism on the part of laymen. A modern doctor thinks nothing
of signing the death certificate of one of his own diphtheria
patients, and then going into the witness box and swearing a
peculiar into prison for six months by assuring the jury, on oath,
that if the prisoner's child, dead of diphtheria, had been placed
under his treatment instead of that of St. James, it would not
have lived. And he does so not only with impunity, but with public
applause, though the logical course would be to prosecute him
either for the murder of his own patient or for perjury in the
case of St. James. Yet no barrister, apparently, dreams of asking
for the statistics of the relative case-mortality in diphtheria
among the Peculiars and among the believers in doctors, on which
alone any valid opinion could be founded. The barrister is as
superstitious as the doctor is infatuated; and the Peculiar goes
unpitied to his cell, though nothing whatever has been proved
except that his child does without the interference of a doctor as
effectually as any of the hundreds of children who die every day
of the same diseases in the doctor's care.


RECOIL OF THE DOGMA OF MEDICAL INFALLIBILITY ON THE DOCTOR

On the other hand, when the doctor is in the dock, or is the
defendant in an action for malpractice, he has to struggle against
the inevitable result of his former pretences to infinite