ARE DOCTORS MEN OF SCIENCE?

I presume nobody will question the existence of widely spread
popular delusion that every doctor is a titan of science. It is
escaped only in the very small class which understands by science
something more than conjuring with retorts and spirit lamps,
magnets and microscopes, and discovering magical cures for
disease. To a sufficiently ignorant man every captain of a
trading schooner is a Galileo, every organ-grinder a Beethoven,
every piano-tuner a Hemholtz, every Old Bailey barrister a Solon,
every Seven Dials pigeon dealer a Darwin, every scrivener a
Shakespear, every locomotive engine a miracle, and its driver no
less wonderful than George Stephenson. As a matter of fact, the
rank and file of doctors are no more scientific than their
tailors; or, if you prefer to put it the reverse way, their
tailors are no less scientific than they. Doctoring is an art,
not a science: any layman who is interested in science
sufficiently to take in one of the scientific journals and follow
the literature of the scientific movement, knows more about it
than those doctors (probably a large majority) who are not
interested in it, and practise only to earn their bread.
Doctoring is not even the art of keeping people in health (no
doctor seems able to advise you what to eat any better than his
grandmother or the nearest quack): it is the art of curing
illnesses. It does happen exceptionally that a practising doctor
makes a contribution to science (my play describes a very notable
one); but it happens much oftener that he draws disastrous
conclusions from his clinical experience because he has no
conception of scientific method, and believes, like any rustic,