The Doctors Dilemma: Preface | Page 3

grudge before the spectacle of a fellow creature in pain or
peril, what you want is comfort, reassurance, something to clutch at,
were it but a straw. This the doctor brings you. You have a wildly
urgent feeling that something must be done; and the doctor does
something. Sometimes what he does kills the patient; but you do not
know that; and the doctor assures you that all that human skill could do
has been done. And nobody has the brutality to say to the newly bereft
father, mother, husband, wife, brother, or sister, "You have killed your
lost darling by your credulity."
THE PECULIAR PEOPLE
Besides, the calling in of the doctor is now compulsory except in cases
where the patient is an adult--and not too ill to decide the steps to be
taken. We are subject to prosecution for manslaughter or for criminal
neglect if the patient dies without the consolations of the medical
profession. This menace is kept before the public by the Peculiar
People. The Peculiars, as they are called, have gained their name by
believing that the Bible is infallible, and taking their belief quite

seriously. The Bible is very clear as to the treatment of illness. The
Epistle of James; chapter v., contains the following explicit directions:
14. Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the Church;
and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the
Lord:
15. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise
him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.
The Peculiars obey these instructions and dispense with doctors. They
are therefore prosecuted for manslaughter when their children die.
When I was a young man, the Peculiars were usually acquitted. The
prosecution broke down when the doctor in the witness box was asked
whether, if the child had had medical attendance, it would have lived. It
was, of course, impossible for any man of sense and honor to assume
divine omniscience by answering this in the affirmative, or indeed
pretending to be able to answer it at all. And on this the judge had to
instruct the jury that they must acquit the prisoner. Thus a judge with a
keen sense of law (a very rare phenomenon on the Bench, by the way)
was spared the possibility of leaving to sentence one prisoner (under
the Blasphemy laws) for questioning the authority of Scripture, and
another for ignorantly and superstitiously accepting it as a guide to
conduct. To-day all this is changed. The doctor never hesitates to claim
divine omniscience, nor to clamor for laws to punish any scepticism on
the part of laymen. A modern doctor thinks nothing of signing the
death certificate of one of his own diphtheria patients, and then going
into the witness box and swearing a peculiar into prison for six months
by assuring the jury, on oath, that if the prisoner's child, dead of
diphtheria, had been placed under his treatment instead of that of St.
James, it would not have lived. And he does so not only with impunity,
but with public applause, though the logical course would be to
prosecute him either for the murder of his own patient or for perjury in
the case of St. James. Yet no barrister, apparently, dreams of asking for
the statistics of the relative case-mortality in diphtheria among the
Peculiars and among the believers in doctors, on which alone any valid
opinion could be founded. The barrister is as superstitious as the doctor
is infatuated; and the Peculiar goes unpitied to his cell, though nothing
whatever has been proved except that his child does without the
interference of a doctor as effectually as any of the hundreds of

children who die every day of the same diseases in the doctor's care.
RECOIL OF THE DOGMA OF MEDICAL INFALLIBILITY ON
THE DOCTOR
On the other hand, when the doctor is in the dock, or is the defendant in
an action for malpractice, he has to struggle against the inevitable result
of his former pretences to infinite knowledge and unerring skill. He has
taught the jury and the judge, and even his own counsel, to believe that
every doctor can, with a glance at the tongue, a touch on the pulse, and
a reading of the clinical thermometer, diagnose with absolute certainty
a patient's complaint, also that on dissecting a dead body he can
infallibly put his finger on the cause of death, and, in cases where
poisoning is suspected, the nature of the poison used. Now all this
supposed exactness and infallibility is imaginary; and to treat a doctor
as if his mistakes were necessarily malicious or corrupt malpractices
(an inevitable deduction from the postulate that the