understood by fashionable tradesmen, who find no difficulty in
persuading their customers to renew articles that are not worn
out and to buy things they do not want. By making doctors
tradesmen, we compel them to learn the tricks of trade;
consequently we find that the fashions of the year include
treatments, operations, and particular drugs, as well as hats,
sleeves, ballads, and games. Tonsils, vermiform appendices,
uvulas, even ovaries are sacrificed because it is the fashion to
get them cut out, and because the operations are highly
profitable. The psychology of fashion becomes a pathology; for
the cases have every air of being genuine: fashions, after all,
are only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced
by tradesmen, and therefore by doctors.


THE DOCTOR'S VIRTUES

It will be admitted that this is a pretty bad state of things.
And the melodramatic instinct of the public, always demanding;
that every wrong shall have, not its remedy, but its villain to
be hissed, will blame, not its own apathy, superstition, and
ignorance, but the depravity of the doctors. Nothing could be
more unjust or mischievous. Doctors, if no better than other men,
are certainly no worse. I was reproached during the performances
of The Doctor's Dilemma at the Court Theatre in 1907 because I
made the artist a rascal, the journalist an illiterate incapable,
and all the doctors "angels." But I did not go beyond the warrant
of my own experience. It has been my luck to have doctors among
my friends for nearly forty years past (all perfectly aware of my
freedom from the usual credulity as to the miraculous powers and