by different names:  Immunization or Radiology or what not; but the dreams which lure us into the adventures from which we learn are always at bottom the same.  Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.  What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say “I know” instead of “I am learning,” and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for scepticism and activity.  Such abominations as the Inquisition and the Vaccination Acts are possible only in the famine years of the soul, when the great vital dogmas of honor, liberty, courage, the kinship of all life, faith that the unknown is greater than the known and is only the As Yet Unknown, and resolution to find a manly highway to it, have been forgotten in a paroxysm of littleness and terror in which nothing is active except concupiscence and the fear of death, playing on which any trader can filch a fortune, any blackguard gratify his cruelty, and any tyrant make us his slaves.

Lest this should seem too rhetorical a conclusion for our professional men of science, who are mostly trained not to believe anything unless it is worded in the jargon of those writers who, because they never really understand what they are trying to say, cannot find familiar words for it, and are therefore compelled to invent a new language of nonsense for every book they write, let me sum up my conclusions as dryly as is consistent with accurate thought and live conviction.

1.  Nothing is more dangerous than a poor doctor:  not even a poor employer or a poor landlord.

2.  Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.

3.  Remember that an illness is a misdemeanor; and treat the doctor as an accessory unless he notifies every case to the Public Health authority.

4.  Treat every death as a possible and under our present system a probable murder, by making it the subject of a reasonably conducted inquest; and execute the doctor, if necessary, as a doctor, by striking him off the register.

5.  Make up your mind how many doctors the community needs to keep it well.  Do not register more or less than this number; and let registration constitute the doctor a civil servant with a dignified living wage paid out of public funds.

6.  Municipalize Harley Street.

7.  Treat the private operator exactly as you would treat a private executioner.

8.  Treat persons who profess to be able to cure disease as you
   treat fortune tellers.

9.  Keep the public carefully informed, by special statistics and announcements of individual cases, of all illnesses of doctors or in their families.

10.  Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his qualifications, the words “Remember that I too am mortal.”