depressed. Digitalis being a drug labelled as a heart specific
by the profession, he promptly administered a stiff dose.
Fortunately the patient was a hardy old lady who was not easily
killed. She recovered with no worse result than her conversion to
Christian Science, which owes its vogue quite as much to public
despair of doctors as to superstition. I am not, observe, here
concerned with the question as to whether the dose of digitalis
was judicious or not; the point is, that a farm laborer
consulting a herbalist would have been treated in exactly the
same way.


BACTERIOLOGY AS A SUPERSTITION

The smattering of science that all--even doctors--pick up from
the ordinary newspapers nowadays only makes the doctor more
dangerous than he used to be. Wise men used to take care to
consult doctors qualified before 1860, who were usually
contemptuous of or indifferent to the germ theory and
bacteriological therapeutics; but now that these veterans have
mostly retired or died, we are left in the hands of the
generations which, having heard of microbes much as St. Thomas
Aquinas heard of angels, suddenly concluded that the whole art of
healing could be summed up in the formula: Find the microbe and
kill it. And even that they did not know how to do. The simplest
way to kill most microbes is to throw them into an open street or
river and let the sun shine on them, which explains the fact that
when great cities have recklessly thrown all their sewage into
the open river the water has sometimes been cleaner twenty miles
below the city than thirty miles above it. But doctors