chanced it, and insisted, when he was unlucky, that the results
were not due to the inoculation, but to some other cause: a
favorite and not very tactful one being the drunkenness or
licentiousness of the patient. But though a few doctors have now
learnt the danger of inoculating without any reference to the
patient's "opsonic index" at the moment of inoculation, and
though those other doctors who are denouncing the danger as
imaginary and opsonin as a craze or a fad, obviously do so
because it involves an operation which they have neither the
means nor the knowledge to perform, there is still no grasp of
the economic change in the situation. They have never been warned
that the practicability of any method of extirpating disease
depends not only on its efficacy, but on its cost. For example,
just at present the world has run raving mad on the subject of
radium, which has excited our credulity precisely as the
apparitions at Lourdes excited the credulity of Roman Catholics.
Suppose it were ascertained that every child in the world could
be rendered absolutely immune from all disease during its entire
life by taking half an ounce of radium to every pint of its milk.
The world would be none the healthier, because not even a Crown
Prince--no, not even the son of a Chicago Meat King, could afford
the treatment. Yet it is doubtful whether doctors would refrain
from prescribing it on that ground. The recklessness with which
they now recommend wintering in Egypt or at Davos to people who
cannot afford to go to Cornwall, and the orders given for
champagne jelly and old port in households where such luxuries
must obviously be acquired at the cost of stinting necessaries,
often make one wonder whether it is possible for a man to go
through a medical training and retain a spark of common sense.
This sort of inconsiderateness gets cured only in the classes