suspected. The Radicals who used to advocate, as an indispensable
preliminary to social reform, the strangling of the last king
with the entrails of the last priest, substituted compulsory
vaccination for compulsory baptism without a murmur.


THE CRAZE FOR OPERATIONS

Thus everything is on the side of the doctor. When men die of
disease they are said to die from natural causes. When they
recover (and they mostly do) the doctor gets the credit of curing
them. In surgery all operations are recorded as successful if the
patient can be got out of the hospital or nursing home alive,
though the subsequent history of the case may be such as would
make an honest surgeon vow never to recommend or perform the
operation again. The large range of operations which consist of
amputating limbs and extirpating organs admits of no direct
verification of their necessity. There is a fashion in operations
as there is in sleeves and skirts: the triumph of some surgeon
who has at last found out how to make a once desperate operation
fairly safe is usually followed by a rage for that operation not
only among the doctors, but actually among their patients. There
are men and women whom the operating table seems to fascinate;
half-alive people who through vanity, or hypochondria, or a
craving to be the constant objects of anxious attention or what
not, lose such feeble sense as they ever had of the value of
their own organs and limbs. They seem to care as little for
mutilation as lobsters or lizards, which at least have the excuse
that they grow new claws and new tails if they lose the old ones.
Whilst this book was being prepared for the press a case was