Then in my Utopia, for every medical man who was mainly occupied in practice, I would have another who was mainly occupied in or about research.  People hear so much about modern research that they do not realise how entirely inadequate it is in amount and equipment.  Our general public is still too stupid to understand the need and value of sustained investigations in any branch of knowledge at all.  In spite of all the lessons of the last century, it still fails to realise how discovery and invention enrich the community and how paying an investment is the public employment of clever people to think and experiment for the benefit of all.  It still expects to get a Newton or a Joule for L800 a year, and requires him to conduct his researches in the margin of time left over when he has got through his annual eighty or ninety lectures.  It imagines discoveries are a sort of inspiration that comes when professors are running to catch trains.  It seems incapable of imagining how enormous are the untried possibilities of research.  Of course, if you will only pay a handful of men salaries at which the cook of any large London hotel would turn up his nose, you cannot expect to have the master minds of the world at your service; and save for a few independent or devoted men, therefore, it is not reasonable to suppose that such a poor little dribble of medical research as is now going on is in the hands of persons of much more than average mental equipment.  How can it be?

One hears a lot of the rigorous research into the problem of cancer that is now going on.  Does the reader realise that all the men in the whole world who are giving any considerable proportion of their time to this cancer research would pack into a very small room, that they are working in little groups without any properly organised system of intercommunication, and that half of them are earning less than a quarter of the salary of a Bond Street shopwalker by those vastly important inquiries?  Not one cancer case in twenty thousand is being properly described and reported.  And yet, in comparison with other diseases, cancer is being particularly well attended to.

The general complacency with the progress in knowledge we have made and are making is ridiculously unjustifiable.  Enormous things were no doubt done in the nineteenth century in many fields of knowledge, but all that was done was out of all proportion petty in comparison with what might have been done.  I suppose the whole of the unprecedented progress in material knowledge of the nineteenth century was the work of two or three thousand men, who toiled against opposition, spite and endless disadvantages, without proper means of intercommunication and with wretched facilities for experiment.  Such discoveries as were distinctively medical were the work of only a few hundred men.  Now, suppose instead of that scattered band of un-co-ordinated workers a great army of hundreds of thousands of well-paid men; suppose, for instance, the community had kept as many scientific and medical investigators as it has bookmakers and racing touts and men about town—­should we not know a thousand times as much as we do about disease and health and strength and power?