NOT MIRACLE WORKERS

Evening Star, Issue 20196, 8 June 1929, Page 2

NOT MIRACLE WORKERS

Dorr BLAKE THE DOCTORS A serius epidemic of smallpox ha.i just been- narrowly averted; cancer and consumption still take their deadly toll; the influenza scourge is not yet stamped out. In face of these alarms and perils the public is prone to ask: Why cannot the doctors shield us from such ills? It is that question (commni in England) which Mr Gerald Gould answers in the 'Sunday Chronicle.’ It is an old saying that every man, by the time he is forty, is either a fool or a doctor. Personally, I have known some men who were both. What happens is that, to a limited extent, one learns by experience. When one has been forty years in tin* world one has picked up some facts about it—and about oneself. The professional doctor, from his wider experience, knows the same sort of thing, only more so. That is the knowledge we have a right to expect'from him. Where we go wrong is in expecting too much, a nd then being unjust in our disappoint* m'ent. Wo ask for miracles, and Upunee lb© poor fellow who fails to perform them.

DOCTORS ARE HUMAN BEINGS. Alter all, the medical man is not a medicine man, nor, unless he has pretended to bo so .(and'charged accord* ingly), have we any grievance against him on that account. Any honest doctor will confess lo you that he is often “stumped,” often bewildered, often mistaken. Why should he not be? Ho general wins every battle; no lawyer wins every case. Moreover, we exact anyhow from his particular profession an extravdinarily high standard of public spirit and private devotion. ’’The wonder is not that we sometimes do not get it, but that we get it as often as we do. A doctor is expected to be never tired, never sleepy, never nervous, and never irritable. If lie is called from one exhausting case to another he must arrive at the second as fresh, as confident, and as competent as at the first.

Nobody would dream of ringing up the local vicar at 2 ’clock in the morning because of a pain in the conscience, but nobody hesitates to have his medical adviser out of bed. night after night, because of a pain iu the stomach.

So, because of the fact that a doctor’s time is other people’s, and his patients can command Jus patience, someone—probably a doctor, or a fool, or both—started tho legend that doctors mere angels in black coats. Why should they he? By what process is it suposed that the typical medical student ceases, at ;v given moment, to bo a beer-drinking, pipe-smoking, song-singing, story-tcil-mg, and dancc-frequenting lad about town, and becomes a saint with a bedside manner?

FALSE CHARGES OF VENALITY. Is ho to fold away all human foibles with his plus-fours, and acquire omniscience with a brass plate? Let ns be reasonable, and not demand tho impossible! Let us be content to say that doctors are pretty good, all tilings considered! Especially, do nou let ys fall into tho popular modern error of denouncing them as ignorant money-grubbers, mho not only do not know their job, but do not want to know it, because obviously it pays them for illness to exist!

Of course, the charge is never-put as definitely as that. Even Mr Bernard Shaw, who has. written very sweepingly against has never denied that there are just and wise practitioners to be found amongst' them; But he has stressed, over and over again, tho financial temptation of their position. It does pay them, directly or indirectly, for other people to be ill. If everybody were always well, and always sure of being well, they would starve — or cease to bo doctors! Mr Shaw does not suggest that they are frailer iu face of this temptation than anybody else would be; but he does suggest that they cannot be wholly above it.

He has drawn, with comic exaggeration, the picture of the fashionable surgeon creating a fashionable disease in order to earn thousands of guineas by performing a fashionable operation 1 This is not, naturally, a full —and, therefore, cannot be a fair—statement of his argument; but it is undeniably the sort of charge bo has implied. And this brings us from the general practitioner to the specialist. The latter has his own temptations, and consequently bis own faults.

FADDISTS AND SPECIALISTS. A doctor may become a specialist for one or two reasons, or for a mixture of the two. He may have a peculiar personal genius for a certain kind of diagnosis, as some people have for playing the piano. Or he may have a fad. Or, as I say, he may have both I Indeed, one may lead to the other. If a man has a good eye for throats he will have a natural human leaning of which he will probably himself be quite unconscious) to trace every human ill to throat disease: if he lias a good ea f for chests, he will go for the lungs: and so on with the teeth and the nerves, and all fractions and aspects of the sufferer—even, nowadays, down to the dreams! WHEN DOCTORS DISAGREE. This is one reason why there are such astonishing changes in medical theory. The other reason is that genuine discoveries are made, but are too often adopted and, so to speak, “put on the market” before their full reactions are understood. A fashion need not be a fad; but if. may arise from a fad, or lead to one. So the wretched public is told this at this time, and that at that; this by one authority, that by another! Cheese, or meat, or nut food, or whatever it may be, is digestible—and indigestible! (The obvious truth being that it suits sonic digestions and not others.) Everything depends on vitamins: everything depends on sunlight! The surgeon’s knife is indispensable I—the surgeon’s knife ought never to be usedl BATTLE OF THE EXPERTS. Expert A wants to jog and jostle our backbones as a cure for headaches; Expert B wants to analyse our psychic reactions as a cure for stomach ache; and Expert C wants to starve us as a cure for everything! Each, doubtless, has a scientific case. Some, doubtless, push their cases too far. The layman, unless ho is a fool, feels bound in self-defence to become a bit of a doctor on his own account—enough of a doctor, at least, to decide when the professional doctors disagree. Only, before condemning the professionals, let ns remember two things. Firstly, the astonishing complication of the material in which they work. (Ourselves; 1) Secondly, how much we. have all owed, at one time or another, to doctors. It may sometimes have paid them for us to be ill; but with what self-sacrifie. ing devotion have they toiled to makK us well 1