As to any technical medical problem specially involved, there is none.
If there were, I should not be competent to deal with it, as I am not a
technical expert in medicine: I deal with the subject as an economist, a
politician, and a citizen exercising my common sense. Everything that I
have said applies equally to all the medical techniques, and will hold
good whether public hygiene be based on the poetic fancies of Christian
Science, the tribal superstitions of the druggist and the vivisector, or
the best we can make of our real knowledge. But I may remind those
who confusedly imagine that the medical problem is also the scientific
problem, that all problems are finally scientific problems. The notion
that therapeutics or hygiene or surgery is any more or less scientific
than making or cleaning boots is entertained only by people to whom
a man of science is still a magician who can cure diseases, transmute
metals, and enable us to live for ever. It may still be necessary for
some time to come to practise on popular credulity, popular love and
dread of the marvellous, and popular idolatry, to induce the poor
to comply with the sanitary regulations they are too ignorant
to understand. As I have elsewhere confessed, I have myself been
responsible for ridiculous incantations with burning sulphur,
experimentally proved to be quite useless, because poor people are
convinced, by the mystical air of the burning and the horrible smell,
that it exorcises the demons of smallpox and scarlet fever and makes it
safe for them to return to their houses. To assure them that the real
secret is sunshine and soap is only to convince them that you do not
care whether they live or die, and wish to save money at their expense.
So you perform the incantation; and back they go to their houses,
satisfied. A religious ceremony--a poetic blessing of the threshold, for
instance--would be much better; but unfortunately our religion is weak
on the sanitary side. One of the worst misfortunes of Christendom was
that reaction against the voluptuous bathing of the imperial Romans
which made dirty habits a part of Christian piety, and in some unlucky
places (the Sandwich Islands for example) made the introduction of
Christianity also the introduction of disease, because the formulators
of the superseded native religion, like Mahomet, had been enlightened
enough to introduce as religious duties such sanitary measures as
ablution and the most careful and reverent treatment of everything
cast off by the human body, even to nail clippings and hairs; and our
missionaries thoughtlessly discredited this godly doctrine without
supplying its place, which was promptly taken by laziness and neglect.
If the priests of Ireland could only be persuaded to teach their flocks
that it is a deadly insult to the Blessed Virgin to place her image in a
cottage that is not kept up to that high standard of Sunday cleanliness
to which all her worshippers must believe she is accustomed, and to
represent her as being especially particular about stables because
her son was born in one, they might do more in one year than all the
Sanitary Inspectors in Ireland could do in twenty; and they could hardly
doubt that Our Lady would be delighted. Perhaps they do nowadays; for
Ireland is certainly a transfigured country since my youth as far as
clean faces and pinafores can transfigure it. In England, where so
many of the inhabitants are too gross to believe in poetic faiths, too
respectable to tolerate the notion that the stable at Bethany was a
common peasant farmer's stable instead of a first-rate racing one, and
too savage to believe that anything can really cast out the devil of
disease unless it be some terrifying hoodoo of tortures and stinks, the
M.O.H. will no doubt for a long time to come have to preach to fools
according to their folly, promising miracles, and threatening hideous
personal consequences of neglect of by-laws and the like; therefore it
will be important that every M.O.H. shall have, with his (or her) other
qualifications, a sense of humor, lest (he or she) should come at last
to believe all the nonsense that must needs be talked. But he must, in
his capacity of an expert advising the authorities, keep the government
itself free of superstition. If Italian peasants are so ignorant that
the Church can get no hold of them except by miracles, why, miracles
there must be. The blood of St. Januarius must liquefy whether the
Saint is in the humor or not. To trick a heathen into being a dutiful
Christian is no worse than to trick a whitewasher into trusting himself
in a room where a smallpox patient has lain, by pretending to exorcise
the disease with burning sulphur. But woe to the Church if in deceiving
the peasant it also deceives itself; for then the Church is lost, and
the peasant too, unless he revolt against it. Unless the Church works
the pretended miracle painfully against the grain, and is continually
urged by its dislike of the imposture to strive to make the peasant
susceptible to the true reasons for behaving well, the Church will
become an instrument of his corruption and an exploiter of his
ignorance, and will find itself launched upon that persecution of
scientific truth of which all priesthoods are accused and none with more
justice than the scientific priesthood.
And here we come to the danger that terrifies so many of us: the danger
of having a hygienic orthodoxy imposed on us. But we must face that: in
such crowded and poverty ridden civilizations as ours any orthodoxy
is better than laisser-faire. If our population ever comes to consist
exclusively of well-to-do, highly cultivated, and thoroughly instructed
free persons in a position to take care of themselves, no doubt they
will make short work of a good deal of official regulation that is now
of life-and-death necessity to us; but under existing circumstances, I
repeat, almost any sort of attention that democracy will stand is better
than neglect. Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as
to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more
honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. The one
lesson that comes out of all our theorizing and experimenting is that
there is only one really scientific progressive method; and that is the
method of trial and error. If you come to that, what is laisser-faire
but an orthodoxy? the most tyrannous and disastrous of all the
orthodoxies, since it forbids you even to learn.