as definitions in any really exact science, is, even at that, an
uncertain and difficult matter on which doctors often differ; and
that the very best medical opinion and treatment varies widely
from doctor to doctor, one practitioner prescribing six or seven
scheduled poisons for so familiar a disease as enteric fever where
another will not tolerate drugs at all; one starving a patient
whom another would stuff; one urging an operation which another
would regard as unnecessary and dangerous; one giving alcohol and
meat which another would sternly forbid, etc., etc., etc.: all
these discrepancies arising not between the opinion of good
doctors and bad ones (the medical contention is, of course, that a
bad doctor is an impossibility), but between practitioners of
equal eminence and authority. Usually it is impossible to persuade
the jury that these facts are facts. Juries seldom notice facts;
and they have been taught to regard any doubts of the omniscience
and omnipotence of doctors as blasphemy. Even the fact that
doctors themselves die of the very diseases they profess to cure
passes unnoticed. We do not shoot out our lips and shake our
heads, saying, "They save others: themselves they cannot save":
their reputation stands, like an African king's palace, on a
foundation of dead bodies; and the result is that the verdict goes
against the defendant when the defendant is a doctor accused of
malpractice.

Fortunately for the doctors, they very seldom find themselves in
this position, because it is so difficult to prove anything
against them. The only evidence that can decide a case of
malpractice is expert evidence: that is, the evidence of other
doctors; and every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a
whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional