There is no harder scientific fact in the world than the fact that
belief can be produced in practically unlimited quantity and intensity,
without observation or reasoning, and even in defiance of both, by the
simple desire to believe founded on a strong interest in believing.
Everybody recognizes this in the case of the amatory infatuations of
the adolescents who see angels and heroes in obviously (to others)
commonplace and even objectionable maidens and youths. But it holds good
over the entire field of human activity. The hardest-headed materialist
will become a consulter of table-rappers and slate-writers if he loses
a child or a wife so beloved that the desire to revive and communicate
with them becomes irresistible. The cobbler believes that there is
nothing like leather. The Imperialist who regards the conquest of
England by a foreign power as the worst of political misfortunes
believes that the conquest of a foreign power by England would be a boon
to the conquered. Doctors are no more proof against such illusions than
other men. Can anyone then doubt that under existing conditions a great
deal of unnecessary and mischievous operating is bound to go on,
and that patients are encouraged to imagine that modern surgery and
anesthesia have made operations much less serious matters than they
really are? When doctors write or speak to the public about operations,
they imply, and often say in so many words, that chloroform has made
surgery painless. People who have been operated on know better.
The patient does not feel the knife, and the operation is therefore
enormously facilitated for the surgeon; but the patient pays for the
anesthesia with hours of wretched sickness; and when that is over there
is the pain of the wound made by the surgeon, which has to heal like any
other wound. This is why operating surgeons, who are usually out of the
house with their fee in their pockets before the patient has recovered
consciousness, and who therefore see nothing of the suffering witnessed
by the general practitioner and the nurse, occasionally talk of
operations very much as the hangman in Barnaby Rudge talked of
executions, as if being operated on were a luxury in sensation as well
as in price.