It will be admitted that this is a pretty bad state of things. And the
melodramatic instinct of the public, always demanding; that every wrong
shall have, not its remedy, but its villain to be hissed, will blame,
not its own apathy, superstition, and ignorance, but the depravity of
the doctors. Nothing could be more unjust or mischievous. Doctors, if no
better than other men, are certainly no worse. I was reproached during
the performances of The Doctor's Dilemma at the Court Theatre in
1907 because I made the artist a rascal, the journalist an illiterate
incapable, and all the doctors "angels." But I did not go beyond the
warrant of my own experience. It has been my luck to have doctors
among my friends for nearly forty years past (all perfectly aware of
my freedom from the usual credulity as to the miraculous powers and
knowledge attributed to them); and though I know that there are medical
blackguards as well as military, legal, and clerical blackguards (one
soon finds that out when one is privileged to hear doctors talking shop
among themselves), the fact that I was no more at a loss for private
medical advice and attendance when I had not a penny in my pocket than I
was later on when I could afford fees on the highest scale, has made it
impossible for me to share that hostility to the doctor as a man which
exists and is growing as an inevitable result of the present condition
of medical practice. Not that the interest in disease and aberrations
which turns some men and women to medicine and surgery is not sometimes
as morbid as the interest in misery and vice which turns some others
to philanthropy and "rescue work." But the true doctor is inspired by
a hatred of ill-health, and a divine impatience of any waste of vital
forces. Unless a man is led to medicine or surgery through a very
exceptional technical aptitude, or because doctoring is a family
tradition, or because he regards it unintelligently as a lucrative and
gentlemanly profession, his motives in choosing the career of a healer
are clearly generous. However actual practice may disillusion and
corrupt him, his selection in the first instance is not a selection of a
base character.