7. Treat the private operator exactly as you would treat a private
executioner.
8. Treat persons who profess to be able to cure disease as you
treat fortune tellers.
9. Keep the public carefully informed, by special statistics and
announcements of individual cases, of all illnesses of doctors or in
their families.
10. Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to
have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his
qualifications, the words "Remember that I too am mortal."
11. In legislation and social organization, proceed on the principle
that invalids, meaning persons who cannot keep themselves alive by their
own activities, cannot, beyond reason, expect to be kept alive by
the activity of others. There is a point at which the most energetic
policeman or doctor, when called upon to deal with an apparently drowned
person, gives up artificial respiration, although it is never possible
to declare with certainty, at any point short of decomposition, that
another five minutes of the exercise would not effect resuscitation. The
theory that every individual alive is of infinite value is legislatively
impracticable. No doubt the higher the life we secure to the individual
by wise social organization, the greater his value is to the community,
and the more pains we shall take to pull him through any temporary
danger or disablement. But the man who costs more than he is worth is
doomed by sound hygiene as inexorably as by sound economics.