In the face of such economic pressure as this, it is silly to
expect that medical teaching, any more than medical practice, can
possibly be scientific. The test to which all methods of
treatment are finally brought is whether they are lucrative to
doctors or not. It would be difficult to cite any proposition
less obnoxious to science, than that advanced by Hahnemann: to
wit, that drugs which in large doses produce certain symptoms,
counteract them in very small doses, just as in more modern
practice it is found that a sufficiently small inoculation with
typhoid rallies our powers to resist the disease instead of
prostrating us with it. But Hahnemann and his followers were
frantically persecuted for a century by generations of
apothecary-doctors whose incomes depended on the quantity of
drugs they could induce their patients to swallow. These two
cases of ordinary vaccination and homeopathy are typical of all
the rest. Just as the object of a trade union under existing
conditions must finally be, not to improve the technical quality
of the work done by its members, but to secure a living wage for
them, so the object of the medical profession today is to secure
an income for the private doctor; and to this consideration all
concern for science and public health must give way when the two
come into conflict. Fortunately they are not always in conflict.
Up to a certain point doctors, like carpenters and masons, must
earn their living by doing the work that the public wants from
them; and as it is not in the nature of things possible that such
public want should be based on unmixed disutility, it may be
admitted that doctors have their uses, real as well as imaginary.
But just as the best carpenter or mason will resist the
introduction of a machine that is likely to throw him out of