The truth is, there would never be any public agreement among doctors if
they did not agree to agree on the main point of the doctor being always
in the right. Yet the two guinea man never thinks that the five shilling
man is right: if he did, he would be understood as confessing to an
overcharge of one pound seventeen shillings; and on the same ground
the five shilling man cannot encourage the notion that the owner of the
sixpenny surgery round the corner is quite up to his mark. Thus even
the layman has to be taught that infallibility is not quite infallible,
because there are two qualities of it to be had at two prices.
But there is no agreement even in the same rank at the same price.
During the first great epidemic of influenza towards the end of
the nineteenth century a London evening paper sent round a
journalist-patient to all the great consultants of that day, and
published their advice and prescriptions; a proceeding passionately
denounced by the medical papers as a breach of confidence of these
eminent physicians. The case was the same; but the prescriptions were
different, and so was the advice. Now a doctor cannot think his own
treatment right and at the same time think his colleague right in
prescribing a different treatment when the patient is the same. Anyone
who has ever known doctors well enough to hear medical shop talked
without reserve knows that they are full of stories about each other's
blunders and errors, and that the theory of their omniscience and
omnipotence no more holds good among themselves than it did with Moliere
and Napoleon. But for this very reason no doctor dare accuse another of
malpractice. He is not sure enough of his own opinion to ruin another
man by it. He knows that if such conduct were tolerated in his
profession no doctor's livelihood or reputation would be worth a year's
purchase. I do not blame him: I would do the same myself. But the effect
of this state of things is to make the medical profession a conspiracy
to hide its own shortcomings. No doubt the same may be said of all
professions. They are all conspiracies against the laity; and I do not
suggest that the medical conspiracy is either better or worse than the
military conspiracy, the legal conspiracy, the sacerdotal conspiracy,
the pedagogic conspiracy, the royal and aristocratic conspiracy, the
literary and artistic conspiracy, and the innumerable industrial,
commercial, and financial conspiracies, from the trade unions to the
great exchanges, which make up the huge conflict which we call society.
But it is less suspected. The Radicals who used to advocate, as an
indispensable preliminary to social reform, the strangling of the
last king with the entrails of the last priest, substituted compulsory
vaccination for compulsory baptism without a murmur.