Crown
Prince--no, not even the son of a Chicago Meat King, could afford
the treatment. Yet it is doubtful whether doctors would refrain from
prescribing it on that ground. The recklessness with which they now
recommend wintering in Egypt or at Davos to people who cannot afford to
go to Cornwall, and the orders given for champagne jelly and old port in
households where such luxuries must obviously be acquired at the cost of
stinting necessaries, often make one wonder whether it is possible for a
man to go through a medical training and retain a spark of common sense.
This sort of inconsiderateness gets cured only in the classes where
poverty, pretentious as it is even at its worst, cannot pitch its
pretences high enough to make it possible for the doctor (himself often
no better off than the patient) to assume that the average income of an
English family is about 2,000 pounds a year, and that it is quite easy
to break up a home, sell an old family seat at a sacrifice, and retire
into a foreign sanatorium devoted to some "treatment" that did not
exist two years ago and probably will not exist (except as a pretext
for keeping an ordinary hotel) two years hence. In a poor practice the
doctor must find cheap treatments for cheap people, or humiliate and
lose his patients either by prescribing beyond their means or sending
them to the public hospitals. When it comes to prophylactic inoculation,
the alternative lies between the complete scientific process, which can
only be brought down to a reasonable cost by being very highly organized
as a public service in a public institution, and such cheap,
nasty, dangerous and scientifically spurious imitations as ordinary
vaccination, which seems not unlikely to be ended, like its equally
vaunted forerunner, XVIII. century inoculation, by a purely reactionary
law making all sorts of vaccination, scientific or not, criminal
offences. Naturally, the poor doctor (that is, the average doctor)
defends ordinary vaccination frantically, as it means to him the bread
of his children. To secure the vehement and practically unanimous
support of the rank and file of the medical profession for any sort of
treatment or operation, all that is necessary is that it can be easily
practised by a rather shabbily dressed man in a surgically dirty room in
a surgically dirty house without any assistance, and that the materials
for it shall cost, say, a penny, and the charge for it to a patient with
100 poun