site
result. And he invented a technique for ascertaining in which phase the
patient happened to be at any given moment. The dramatic possibilities
of this discovery and invention will be found in my play. But it is one
thing to invent a technique: it is quite another to persuade the medical
profession to acquire it. Our general practitioners, I gather, simply
declined to acquire it, being mostly unable to afford either the
acquisition or the practice of it when acquired. Something simple,
cheap, and ready at all times for all comers, is, as I have shown, the
only thing that is economically possible in general practice, whatever
may be the case in Sir Almroth's famous laboratory in St. Mary's
Hospital. It would have become necessary to denounce opsonin in the
trade papers as a fad and Sir Almroth as a dangerous man if his practice
in the laboratory had not led him to the conclusion that the customary
inoculations were very much too powerful, and that a comparatively
infinitesimal dose would not precipitate a negative phase of cooking
activity, and might induce a positive one. And thus it happens that the
refusal of our general practitioners to acquire the new technique is
no longer quite so dangerous in practice as it was when The Doctor's
Dilemma was written: nay, that Sir Ralph Bloomfield Boningtons way of
administering inoculations as if they were spoonfuls of squills may
sometimes work fairly well. For all that, I find Sir Almroth Wright,
on the 23rd May, 1910, warning the Royal Society of Medicine that "the
clinician has not yet been prevailed upon to reconsider his position,"
which means that the general practitioner ("the doctor," as he is called
in our homes) is going on just as he did before, and could not afford
to learn or practice a new technique even if he had ever heard of it.
To the patient who does not know about it he will say nothing. To the
patient who does, he will ridicule it, and disparage Sir Almroth. What
else can he do, except confess his ignorance and starve?

But now please observe how "the whirligig of time brings its revenges."
This latest discovery of the remedial virtue of a very, very tiny
hair of the dog that bit you reminds us, not only of Arndt's law of
protoplasmic reaction to stimuli, according to which weak and strong
stimuli provoke opposite reactions, but of Hahnemann's homeopathy, which
was founded on the fact alleged by Hahnemann that drugs which produce
certain symptoms when ta