How to Be a Doctor

Certainly the progress of science is a wonderful thing. Naturally one feels' proud of it. I must say that I do. Whenever I get talking to anyone — that is, to anyone, who knows even less about it than I do — about the surprising development of electricity for instance, I feel as if I had been personally responsible for it.
However, that is not the point I am going to discuss. What I want to speak about is progress of medicine. There, if you like, is something really surprising.
Just think of it. A hundred years ago there were no bacilli , no diphtheria and no appendicitis . All of these we have thanks to medical science.
Or consider the achievements of medical science on its practical side. The modern doctor's business is a very simple one. This is the way it is done.
The patient enters the consulting room. "Doctor," he says, "I have a bad pain." "Where is it?" "Here." "Stand up," says the doctor, "and put your arms up above your head." Then the doctor goes behind the patient and strikes him a powerful blow in the back. "Do you feel that?" he says. "I do," says the patient. Then the doctor turns suddenly and lets him have a left hook under the heart. "Can you feel that?" he says, as the patient falls over on the sofa nearly fainting . "Get up," says the doctor, and counts ten. The patient rises. The doctor looks him over very carefully without speaking, and then walks over to the window and reads the morning paper for a while. Then he turns and begins speaking in a low voice more to himself than to the patient. "Hum!" he says, "there's a slight anaesthesia of the tympanum ." "Is that so?" says the frightened patient. "What can I do about it, doctor?" "Well," says the doctor, "I want you to keep very quiet-, you'll have to go to bed and stay there and keep quiet." In fact the doctor hasn’t the least idea what's wrong with the man; but he does know that if he goes to bed and keeps quiet, really very quiet, he'll either get quietly well again or else die a quiet death.
"What about diet, doctor?" says the patient, quite frightened.
The answer to this question varies a great deal. It depends on how the doctor is feeling and whether it is a long time since he had a meal himself.
Of course, this treatment in itself would fail to give the patient proper confidence. But nowadays this element is supplied by the work of the analytical laboratory. Whatever is wrong with the patient the doctor insists on cutting off parts and pieces and extracts of him and sending them away to be analyzed. He cuts off some of the patient's hair, marks it "Mr Smith's Hair, October, 1910." Then he cuts off the lower part of the ear, and wraps it in paper and labels it "Part of Mr Smith's Ear, October, 1910." Then he looks the patient up and down with the scissors in his hand, and if he sees any likely part of him he cuts it off and wraps it up. Now this, strangely enough, is the very thing that fills the patient with that sense of personal importance which is worth paying for. "Imagine", says the bandaged (nepeBH3bi-Baib) patient later in the day to a group of friends obviously impressed, "the doctor thinks there my be a slight anaesthesia of the prognosis, but he's sent my ear to New York and my appendix to Baltimore and some of my hair to the editor of all the medical journals, and meantime I am to keep very quiet and not strain myself. "With that he falls back in the armchair quite happy.
And yet, isn't it funny?
You and I and the rest of us — even if we know all this — as soon as we have a pain inside us, run for a doctor as fast as a taxi can take us. Yes, personally, I even prefer an ambulance with a bell on it. It's more comforting.