re is no demand for it; nor can the
grossest quackery be kept off the market if there is a demand for it.

FASHIONS AND EPIDEMICS

A demand, however, can be inculcated. This is thoroughly understood
by fashionable tradesmen, who find no difficulty in persuading their
customers to renew articles that are not worn out and to buy things they
do not want. By making doctors tradesmen, we compel them to learn the
tricks of trade; consequently we find that the fashions of the year
include treatments, operations, and particular drugs, as well as hats,
sleeves, ballads, and games. Tonsils, vermiform appendices, uvulas, even
ovaries are sacrificed because it is the fashion to get them cut out,
and because the operations are highly profitable. The psychology of
fashion becomes a pathology; for the cases have every air of being
genuine: fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics, proving that
epidemics can be induced by tradesmen, and therefore by doctors.

THE DOCTOR'S VIRTUES

It will be admitted that this is a pretty bad state of things. And the
melodramatic instinct of the public, always demanding; that every wrong
shall have, not its remedy, but its villain to be hissed, will blame,
not its own apathy, superstition, and ignorance, but the depravity of
the doctors. Nothing could be more unjust or mischievous. Doctors, if no
better than other men, are certainly no worse. I was reproached during
the performances of The Doctor's Dilemma at the Court Theatre in
1907 because I made the artist a rascal, the journalist an illiterate
incapable, and all the doctors "angels." But I did not go beyond the
warrant of my own experience. It has been my luck to have doctors
among my friends for nearly forty years past (all perfectly aware of
my freedom from the usual credulity as to the miraculous powers and
knowledge attributed to them); and though I know that there are medical
blackguards as well as military, legal, and clerical blackguards (one
soon finds that out when one is privileged to hear doctors talking shop
among themselves), the fact that I was no more at a loss for private
medical advice and attendance when I had not a penny in my pocket than I
was later on when I could afford fees on the highest scale, has made it
impossible for me to share that hostility to the doctor as a man which
exists and is growing as an inevitable result of the present condition
of medical practice. Not that the interest in disease and