etiquet by giving him away. It is the nurse who gives the doctor
away in private, because every nurse has some particular doctor
whom she likes; and she usually assures her patients that all the
others are disastrous noodles, and soothes the tedium of the sick-
bed by gossip about their blunders. She will even give a doctor
away for the sake of making the patient believe that she knows
more than the doctor. But she dare not, for her livelihood, give
the doctor away in public. And the doctors stand by one another at
all costs. Now and then some doctor in an unassailable position,
like the late Sir William Gull, will go into the witness box and
say what he really thinks about the way a patient has been
treated; but such behavior is considered little short of infamous
by his colleagues.


WHY DOCTORS DO NOT DIFFER

The truth is, there would never be any public agreement among
doctors if they did not agree to agree on the main point of the
doctor being always in the right. Yet the two guinea man never
thinks that the five shilling man is right: if he did, he would
be understood as confessing to an overcharge of one pound
seventeen shillings; and on the same ground the five shilling man
cannot encourage the notion that the owner of the sixpenny
surgery round the corner is quite up to his mark. Thus even the
layman has to be taught that infallibility is not quite
infallible, because there are two qualities of it to be had at
two prices.

But there is no agreement even in the same rank at the same