own treatment right and at the same time think his colleague right in prescribing a different treatment when the patient is the same.  Anyone who has ever known doctors well enough to hear medical shop talked without reserve knows that they are full of stories about each other’s blunders and errors, and that the theory of their omniscience and omnipotence no more holds good among themselves than it did with Moliere and Napoleon.  But for this very reason no doctor dare accuse another of malpractice.  He is not sure enough of his own opinion to ruin another man by it.  He knows that if such conduct were tolerated in his profession no doctor’s livelihood or reputation would be worth a year’s purchase.  I do not blame him:  I would do the same myself.  But the effect of this state of things is to make the medical profession a conspiracy to hide its own shortcomings.  No doubt the same may be said of all professions.  They are all conspiracies against the laity; and I do not suggest that the medical conspiracy is either better or worse than the military conspiracy, the legal conspiracy, the sacerdotal conspiracy, the pedagogic conspiracy, the royal and aristocratic conspiracy, the literary and artistic conspiracy, and the innumerable industrial, commercial, and financial conspiracies, from the trade unions to the great exchanges, which make up the huge conflict which we call society.  But it is less suspected.  The Radicals who used to advocate, as an indispensable preliminary to social reform, the strangling of the last king with the entrails of the last priest, substituted compulsory vaccination for compulsory baptism without a murmur.

THE CRAZE FOR OPERATIONS

Thus everything is on the side of the doctor.  When men die of disease they are said to die from natural causes.  When they recover (and they mostly do) the doctor gets the credit of curing them.  In surgery all operations are recorded as successful if the patient can be got out of the hospital or nursing home alive, though the subsequent history of the case may be such as would make an honest surgeon vow never to recommend or perform the operation again.  The large range of operations which consist of amputating limbs and extirpating organs admits of no direct verification of their necessity.  There is a fashion in operations as there is in sleeves and skirts:  the triumph of some surgeon who has at last found out how to make a once desperate operation fairly safe is usually followed by a rage for that operation not only among the doctors, but actually among their patients.  There are men and women whom the operating table seems to fascinate; half-alive people who through vanity, or hypochondria, or a craving to be the constant objects of anxious attention or what not, lose such feeble sense as they ever had of the value of their own organs and limbs.  They seem to care as little for mutilation as lobsters or lizards, which at least have the excuse