158 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



by the treatment of which they make their livelihood. A gross 

 fatalism, chill and hopeless as the inscription at the portals of 

 Dante's Inferno, would in this respect seem to brood over and 

 benumb the minds of both the medical profession and the 

 general public. In a recent work on that somewhat depressing- 

 locality, the East End of London, the writer thus describes the 

 mental attitude of its denizens towards their unwholesome 

 physical environment : " The factory chimney belches forth 

 obstruction. But no murmur escapes the East-Ender. Smoke 

 in his view is inevitable, part of the ordinary course of nature ; 

 and he would as soon think of opposing it as he would of 

 opposing the thunderstorm." That, with all deference, appears 

 to be the present standpoint from which the majority of doctors 

 envisage the majority of this large class of diseases ; they 

 prescribe for the symptoms from an overgrown yet continually 

 increasing armamentum of drugs ; they will recommend a 

 change of climate, a holiday and so forth ; on occasion they 

 even suggest some half-hearted alteration in the diet customary 

 in the patient's particular class ; but that the affliction pressing 

 upon him was preventible, that through any acts or abstentions 

 the public generally may attain freedom from such disease or 

 class of diseases, these are ideas wholly foreign as yet to the 

 psychosis of the medical profession. Like simple Orientals at 

 the shrine of Mariamma, the goddess of small-pox, the orthodox 

 medical practitioners and the laity in their train abase them- 

 selves with quite pathetic humility before the spectre of metabolic 

 disease. 



Perhaps the key to this attitude of sterile pessimism may 

 lie in the very word " laity," so commonly used in the course 

 of medical discussions. Is there not more than a tinge of 

 sacerdotalism in the mental attitude affected by the great 

 majority of the profession ; " the air of the priest with the 

 feeling of personal importance, the thin unction and private 

 leanings to the cord and the stake " ? Do not too many doctors 

 still regard any discussion of medical matters with members of 

 the public as unprofessional, and do they not too often assail 

 novel ideas as to the etiology of disease with all the acrimony 

 of a mediaeval priest? The welcome accorded to Jenner's and 

 Harding's discoveries, to John Brown and to Ignatius Sammel- 

 weiss, has many an analogy in modern times. In no other 

 profession are the public styled the laity; no other men of 



