and a divine impatience of any waste of vital forces.  Unless a man is led to medicine or surgery through a very exceptional technical aptitude, or because doctoring is a family tradition, or because he regards it unintelligently as a lucrative and gentlemanly profession, his motives in choosing the career of a healer are clearly generous.  However actual practice may disillusion and corrupt him, his selection in the first instance is not a selection of a base character.

THE DOCTOR’S HARDSHIPS

A review of the counts in the indictment I have brought against private medical practice will show that they arise out of the doctor’s position as a competitive private tradesman:  that is, out of his poverty and dependence.  And it should be borne in mind 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 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