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 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."