condition of a fireman at a fire. In other occupations night-work
is specially recognized and provided for. The worker sleeps all
day; has his breakfast in the evening; his lunch or dinner at
midnight; his dinner or supper before going to bed in the
morning; and he changes to day-work if he cannot stand night-
work. But a doctor is expected to work day and night. In
practices which consist largely of workmen's clubs, and in which
the patients are therefore taken on wholesale terms and very
numerous, the unfortunate assistant, or the principal if he has
no assistant, often does not undress, knowing that he will be
called up before he has snatched an hour's sleep. To the strain
of such inhuman conditions must be added the constant risk of
infection. One wonders why the impatient doctors do not become
savage and unmanageable, and the patient ones imbecile. Perhaps
they do, to some extent. And the pay is wretched, and so
uncertain that refusal to attend without payment in advance
becomes often a necessary measure of self-defence, whilst the
County Court has long ago put an end to the tradition that the
doctor's fee is an honorarium. Even the most eminent physicians,
as such biographies as those of Paget show, are sometimes
miserably, inhumanly poor until they are past their prime.
In short, the doctor needs our help for the moment much more than
we often need his. The ridicule of Moliere, the death of a well-
informed and clever writer like the late Harold Frederic in the
hands of Christian Scientists (a sort of sealing with his blood
of the contemptuous disbelief in and dislike of doctors he had
bitterly expressed in his books), the scathing and quite
justifiable exposure of medical practice in the novel by Mr.
Maarten Maartens entitled The New Religion: all these trouble the
doctor very little, and are in any case well set off by the