knowledge and unerring skill. He has taught the jury and the
judge, and even his own counsel, to believe that every doctor can,
with a glance at the tongue, a touch on the pulse, and a reading
of the clinical thermometer, diagnose with absolute certainty a
patient's complaint, also that on dissecting a dead body he can
infallibly put his finger on the cause of death, and, in cases
where poisoning is suspected, the nature of the poison used. Now
all this supposed exactness and infallibility is imaginary; and to
treat a doctor as if his mistakes were necessarily malicious or
corrupt malpractices (an inevitable deduction from the postulate
that the doctor, being omniscient, cannot make mistakes) is as
unjust as to blame the nearest apothecary for not being prepared
to supply you with sixpenny-worth of the elixir of life, or the
nearest motor garage for not having perpetual motion on sale in
gallon tins. But if apothecaries and motor car makers habitually
advertized elixir of life and perpetual motion, and succeeded in
creating a strong general belief that they could supply it, they
would find themselves in an awkward position if they were indicted
for allowing a customer to die, or for burning a chauffeur by
putting petrol into his car. That is the predicament the doctor
finds himself in when he has to defend himself against a charge of
malpractice by a plea of ignorance and fallibility. His plea is
received with flat credulity; and he gets little sympathy, even
from laymen who know, because he has brought the incredulity on
himself. If he escapes, he can only do so by opening the eyes of
the jury to the facts that medical science is as yet very
imperfectly differentiated from common curemongering witchcraft;
that diagnosis, though it means in many instances (including even
the identification of pathogenic bacilli under the microscope)
only a choice among terms so loose that they would not be accepted