that doctors are expected to treat other people specially well
whilst themselves submitting to specially inconsiderate
treatment. The butcher and baker are not expected to feed the
hungry unless the hungry can pay; but a doctor who allows a
fellow-creature to suffer or perish without aid is regarded as a
monster. Even if we must dismiss hospital service as really
venal, the fact remains that most doctors do a good deal of
gratuitous work in private practice all through their careers.
And in his paid work the doctor is on a different footing to the
tradesman. Although the articles he sells, advice and treatment,
are the same for all classes, his fees have to be graduated like
the income tax. The successful fashionable doctor may weed his
poorer patients out from time to time, and finally use the
College of Physicians to place it out of his own power to accept
low fees; but the ordinary general practitioner never makes out
his bills without considering the taxable capacity of his
patients.

Then there is the disregard of his own health and comfort which
results from the fact that he is, by the nature of his work, an
emergency man. We are polite and considerate to the doctor when
there is nothing the matter, and we meet him as a friend or
entertain him as a guest; but when the baby is suffering from
croup, or its mother has a temperature of 104 degrees, or its
grandfather has broken his leg, nobody thinks of the doctor
except as a healer and saviour. He may be hungry, weary, sleepy,
run down by several successive nights disturbed by that
instrument of torture, the night bell; but who ever thinks of
this in the face of sudden sickness or accident? We think no more
of the condition of a doctor attending a case than of the