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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LIII. No. 1374 



tations of his art when he resurrected the 

 dead. Later the complaint of Pliny and 

 Petrarch also was that the doctors took un- 

 ethical liberties with their opportunities. 

 Pindar, Pliny, Petrarch, Moliere, even Dr. 

 Rabelais himself by inference, lash tlie doc- 

 tors with the bitterest invectives for trans- 

 gressions, some of which we admit to-day are 

 daily committed against the ethics of the 

 profession. It becomes stereotyped in Pliny, 

 Petrarch and Moliere. 



Whether ■well done or badly done it is always 

 paid alike. ... A shoemaker in making a pair of 

 shoes can't spoil a piece of leather without paying 

 for it, but at 'this business when we spoil a man 

 it does not cost us a cent. 



Even Socrates has the same jibe put in his 

 mouth by Plato, and to this Petrarch manages 

 to allude, but to our unwritten modern ethical 

 standards it is all flagrant plagiarism. As 

 to medicine much of this continual abuse 

 of it in ancient and modern satire is due to 

 the underlying vice in its social regulation. 

 It is the sole one of human activities wherein 

 its practitioners are admonished, nay forced 

 so far as possible, to work directly against 

 their own material interests. ~No punishment 

 is too severe, if we could only get at him, 

 for the criminal who tries to further his com- 

 mercial interests by the unnecessary worry 

 and botheration to a patient, whom nature is 

 better able to treat than the doctor. Is there 

 any doubt of the occasional justification for 

 such complaint? What is there against the 

 other impostors of commerce? For them such 

 conduct is ethical business. As for medical 

 men attempting to stimulate their business 

 by setting plagues agoing, that is unthinkable. 

 Indeed the evolution of public health preser- 

 vation is making daily more clear the 

 anomaly of this age-long status of practi- 

 tioners of medicine, and daily one sees more 

 or less abortive attempts in the direction of 

 change. Now the underlying cause of all 

 this plagiarism in the satires and jibes against 

 the doctors is the broad one of maladjustment 

 of a certain social agency. It is the con- 

 tinued protest of society, falling into fairly 

 narrow channels of expression it is true, but 



it is also true that no one censures Moliere 

 or Petrarch, or ever did censure them for 

 using ancient jokes and jibes as their own.^ 



Ifow the thread that runs through the 

 stories of the effect wi'ought on the layman's 

 mind by comparing the ideas aroused by view- 

 ing for the first time other worlds than ours 

 through the telescope is that which the 

 preacher seizes to emphasize the glory of God 

 and the insignificance of man, whom he has 

 created. That has been dinged into the con- 

 sciousness of countless generations of men, 

 ever more insistently, as modern science has 

 made it more and more manifest. The sug- 

 gestion of a parity becomes daily more gro- 

 tesque. This grotesqueness finds frequent 

 issue in words and it is not difficult to 

 imagine that even the words are closely 

 similar, when the humor of the thought 

 strikes the same spot in the observer's mental 

 machine. 



Let me take a more concrete example. 

 Does any one supxwse that when Mark Twain 

 wrote the extremely amusing dialogue in Tom 

 Sawyer Abroad between Nigger Jim and the 

 hero he was plagiarising Pliny? The former 

 had a poor opinion of painters. One of them 

 " was paintin' dat old brindle cow wid de 

 near horn gone — ^you knows de one I means. 

 . . . He say when he git her painted de pic- 

 tur's worth a hundred dollars. Mars Tom, he 

 could a got de cow for fifteen." So Pliny's 

 barbarian Gaul with the long hair, when at 

 Rome was asked on his glancing at a master- 

 piece of an old slave leaning on his staff 

 what he would give for it in cash. " I would 

 not give a farthing even for the slave "^ was 

 his contemptuous reply. It is apparent that 

 such a joke is always lying close to the sur- 

 face through all the ages since man made his 

 drawings on the walls of the dark caves at 

 Altamira and that is the way with the joke 

 about the stars. 



Lawyers are always writing to the astrono- 

 mers for knowledge of when the moon might 



2 ' ' Ancient jibes at the doctors, ' ' New Tori: 

 Medical Becord, September 12, 1903. 



3 Pliny, ' ' Historia Naturalis, ' ' Liber SXXV., 

 8 Ed., Silling, Vol. V., p. 211. 



