The smattering of science that all--even doctors--pick up from the
ordinary newspapers nowadays only makes the doctor more dangerous than
he used to be. Wise men used to take care to consult doctors qualified
before 1860, who were usually contemptuous of or indifferent to the germ
theory and bacteriological therapeutics; but now that these veterans
have mostly retired or died, we are left in the hands of the generations
which, having heard of microbes much as St. Thomas Aquinas heard of
angels, suddenly concluded that the whole art of healing could be summed
up in the formula: Find the microbe and kill it. And even that they did
not know how to do. The simplest way to kill most microbes is to throw
them into an open street or river and let the sun shine on them, which
explains the fact that when great cities have recklessly thrown all
their sewage into the open river the water has sometimes been cleaner
twenty miles below the city than thirty miles above it. But doctors
instinctively avoid all facts that are reassuring, and eagerly swallow
those that make it a marvel that anyone could possibly survive three
days in an atmosphere consisting mainly of countless pathogenic
germs. They conceive microbes as immortal until slain by a germicide
administered by a duly qualified medical man. All through Europe people
are adjured, by public notices and even under legal penalties, not to
throw their microbes into the sunshine, but to collect them carefully in
a handkerchief; shield the handkerchief from the sun in the darkness
and warmth of the pocket; and send it to a laundry to be mixed up with
everybody else's handkerchiefs, with results only too familiar to local
health authorities.
In the first frenzy of microbe killing, surgical instruments were dipped
in carbolic oil, which was a great improvement on not dipping them in
anything at all and simply using them dirty; but as microbes are so fond
of carbolic oil that they swarm in it, it was not a success from the
anti-microbe point of view. Formalin was squirted into the circulation
of consumptives until it was discovered that formalin nourishes the
tubercle bacillus handsomely and kills men. The popular theory of
disease is the common medical theory: namely, that every disease had
its microbe duly created in the garden of Eden, and has been steadily
propagating itself and producing widening circles of malignant disease
ever since. It was plain from the first that if this had been even
approximately true, the whole human race would have been wiped out by
the plague long ago, and that every epidemic, instead of fading out as
mysteriously as it rushed in, would spread over the whole world. It was
also evident that the characteristic microbe of a disease might be a
symptom instead of a cause. An unpunctual man is always in a hurry;
but it does not follow that hurry is the cause of unpunctuality: on the
contrary, what is the matter with the patient is sloth. When Florence
Nightingale said bluntly that if you overcrowded your soldiers in dirty
quarters there would be an outbreak of smallpox among them, she was
snubbed as an ignorant female who did not know that smallpox can be
produced only by the importation of its specific microbe.
If this was the line taken about smallpox, the microbe of which
has never yet been run down and exposed under the microscope by the
bacteriologist, what must have been the ardor of conviction as to
tuberculosis, tetanus, enteric fever, Maltese fever, diphtheria, and
the rest of the diseases in which the characteristic bacillus had been
identified! When there was no bacillus it was assumed that, since
no disease could exist without a bacillus, it was simply eluding
observation. When the bacillus was found, as it frequently was, in
persons who were not suffering from the disease, the theory was saved
by simply calling the bacillus an impostor, or pseudobacillus. The same
boundless credulity which the public exhibit as to a doctor's power of
diagnosis was shown by the doctors themselves as to the analytic
microbe hunters. These witch finders would give you a certificate of the
ultimate constitution of anything from a sample of the water from your
well to a scrap of your lungs, for seven-and-sixpense. I do not suggest
that the analysts were dishonest. No doubt they carried the analysis as
far as they could afford to carry it for the money. No doubt also they
could afford to carry it far enough to be of some use. But the fact
remains that just as doctors perform for half-a-crown, without the least
misgiving, operations which could not be thoroughly and safely performed
with due scientific rigor and the requisite apparatus by an unaided
private practitioner for less than some thousands of pounds, so did they
proceed on the assumption that they could get the last word of science
as to the constituents of their pathological samples for a two hours cab
fare.