forth) from the public funds. But the
fact remains that for the great mass of the medical profession there is
no living to be got except at a salary for hospital practice or by
earning fees in receiving or attending upon private cases.

So long as a doctor is learning or adding to knowledge, he earns
nothing, and the common, unintelligent man does not see why he should
earn anything. So that a doctor who has no religious passion for poverty
and self-devotion gets through the minimum of training and learning as
quickly and as cheaply as possible, and does all he can to fill up the
rest of his time in passing rapidly from case to case. The busier he
keeps, the less his leisure for thought and learning, the richer he
grows, and the more he is esteemed. His four or five years of hasty,
crowded study are supposed to give him a complete and final knowledge of
the treatment of every sort of disease, and he goes on year after year,
often without co-operation, working mechanically in the common incidents
of practice, births, cases of measles and whooping cough, and so forth,
and blundering more or less in whatever else turns up.

There are no public specialists to whom he can conveniently refer the
difficulties he constantly encounters; only in the case of rich patients
is the specialist available; there are no properly organised information
bureaus for him, and no means whatever of keeping him informed upon
progress and discovery in medical science. He is not even required to
set apart a month or so in every two or three years in order to return
to lectures and hospitals and refresh his knowledge. Indeed, the income
of the average general practitioner would not permit of such a thing,
and almost the only means of contact between him and current thought
lies in the one or other of our two great medical weeklies to which he
happens to subscribe.

Now just as I have nothing but praise for the average general
practitioner, so I have nothing but praise and admiration for those
stalwart-looking publications. Without them I can imagine nothing but
the most terrible intellectual atrophy among our medical men. But since
they are private properties run for profit they have to pay, and half
their bulk consists of the brilliantly written advertisements of new
drugs and apparatus. They give much knowledge, they do much to ventilate
perplexing questions, but a broadly conceived and properly endowed
weekly circular could, I believe, do much