VI
ON MEDICAL CONSERVATION
"I see by the paper this morning," said the Idiot, as he put three lumpsof sugar into his pocket and absent-mindedly dropped his eyeglasses intohis coffee, "that, thanks to the industry of our Medical Schools andColleges, the world is richer by thirty thousand new doctors to-day thanit was yesterday. How does the law of supply and demand work in cases ofthat kind, Doctor Squills?"
"Badly--very badly, indeed," said the Doctor, with a gloomy shake of hishead. "The profession is sadly overcrowded, and mighty few of us aremaking more than a bare living."
"I was afraid that was the case," said the Idiot sympathetically. "I wastalking with a prominent surgeon at the Club the other night, and he wasterribly upset over the situation. He intimated that we have beenruthlessly squandering our natural internal resources almost asriotously and as blindly as our lumbermen have been destroying thenatural physical resources of the country. He assured me that he himselfhad reached a point in his career where there was hardly a vermiformappendix left in sight, and where five years ago he was chopping downnot less than four of these a day for six days of the week at a thousanddollars per, it was now a lucky time for him when he got his pruningknife off the hook once a month."
"That vermiform appendix craze was all a fad anyhow," said theBibliomaniac sourly. "Like the tango, and bridge, and golf, andslumming, and all the rest of those things that Society takes up, andthen drops all of a sudden like a hot stick. It looked at one time as ifnobody could hope to get into society who hadn't had his vermiformremoved."
"Well, social fad or not," said the Idiot, "whatever it was, there is noquestion about it that serious inroads have been made upon what we maycall our vermiforests, and unless something is done to protect them, byGeorge, in a few years we won't have any left except a few stuffedspecimens down in the Smithsonian Institution.
"I asked my friend Doctor Cuttem why he didn't call for a VermiformConservation Congress to see what can be done either to prevent thisruthless sacrifice of a product that if suitably safeguarded shouldsupply ourselves, and our children, and our children's children to theuttermost posterity, with ample appendicular resources for themaintenance in good style of a reasonable number of surgeons; or tore-seed scientifically where the unscientific destruction of theseresources is uncontrollable. How about that, Doctor? Suppose you removea man's vermiform appendix--is there any system of medical, or surgical,fertilization and replanting that would cause two vermiforms to growwhere only one grew before, so that sooner or later every human interiormay become a sort of garden-close, where one can go and pluck a handfulof vermiform appendices every morning, like so many hardy perennials infull bloom?"
"I'm afraid not," smiled the Doctor.
"Anybody but the Idiot would know that it couldn't be done," said theBibliomaniac, "because if it could be done it would have been done longago. When you find men successfully transplanting rabbits' tails onmonkeys, and frogs' legs on canary birds, you can make up your mind thatif it were within the range of human possibility they would by this timehave vermiform appendices sprouting lushly in geranium pots forinsertion into the systems of persons desiring luxuries of that sort."
"You mustn't sneer at the achievements of modern surgery, Mr. Bib," saidthe Idiot. "There is no telling how soon any one of us may need to availhimself of its benefits. Who knows--maybe a surgeon will come along someday who will be able to implant a sense of humor in you, to gladden allyour days."
"Preposterous!" snapped the Bibliomaniac.
"Well, it does seem unlikely," said the Idiot, "but I know of a youngdoctor who without any previous experience planted a little heart in afrigid Suffragette; and though I know the soil is not propitious, evenyou may sometime be blossoming luxuriantly within with buds of cheer andsweet optimism. But however this may be, it is the unquestioned and sadfact that a once profitable industry for our surgically-inclinedbrothers has slumped; and they tell me that even those surgeons who haveadopted modern commercial methods, and give away a set of RudyardKipling's Works and a year's subscription to the _Commoner_ with everyvermiform removed, are making less than a thousand dollars a week out ofthat branch of their work."
"Mercy!" cried the Poet. "What couldn't I do if I had a thousand dollarsa week!"
"You could afford to write real poetry all the time, instead of onlyhalf the time, eh, old man?" said the Idiot affectionately. "But don'tyou mind. We're all in the same boat. I'd be an infinitely bigger idiotmyself if I had half as much money as that."
"Impossible!" said the Bibliomaniac, chuckling over his opportunity.
"Green-eyed monster!" smiled the Idiot. "But speaking of thisovercrowding of the profession, it is a surprise to me, Doctor, that somany young men are taking up medicine these days, when competentobservers everywhere tell us that the world is getting better all thetime.
"If that is true, and the world really is getting better all the time,it is fair to assume that some day it will be entirely well, and then,let me ask you, what is to become of all the doctors? It will not be agood thing for Society ever to reach a point where it has such an armyof unemployed on its hands, and especially that kind of an army, made upas it will be of highly intelligent but desperately hungry men, face toface with starvation, and yet licensed by the possession of a medicaldiploma to draw, and have filled, prescriptions involving the wholerange of the materia medica, from Iceland moss and squills up to prussicacid and cyanide of potassium.
"It makes me shudder to think of it!" said Mr. Brief, the lawyer, with agrin at the Doctor.
"Shudder isn't the word!" said the Idiot. "The bare idea makes my fleshcreep like a Philadelphia trolley car! Coxey's Army was bad enough, madeup as it was of a poor, miserable lot of tramps and panhandlers, all sounused to labor as to be really jobshy; but in their most riotous moodsthe worst those poor chaps could do was to heave a few bricks or a deadcat through a millinery shop window, or perhaps bat a village magnate onthe back of the head with a bed slat. There was nothing insidiouslysubtle about the warfare they waged upon Society.
"But suppose that, laboring under a smarting sense of similar wrongs,there should come to be such a thing as old Doctor Pepsin's Army ofUnemployed Physicians and Surgeons, marching through the country, headedfor the White House in order to make an impressive public demonstrationof their grievances! What a peril to the body politic that would be! Notonly could the surgeons waylay the village magnates and amputate theirlegs, and seize hostile editors and cut off the finger with which theyrun their typewriting machines, and point with alarm with; but the moreinsidious means of upsetting the public weal by pouring calomel into ourwells, putting castor oil in our reservoirs, leaving cholera germs andtyphoid cultures under our door mats, or transferring a pair ofjackass's legs to the hind-quarters of an old family horse, foundgrazing in the pasture, would transform a once smiling countryside intoa scene of misery and desolation."
"Poor, poor Dobbin!" murmured the Bibliomaniac.
"Indeed, Mr. Bib, it will be poor, poor Dobbin!" said the Idiot. "Idon't think that many people besides you and myself realize howdesperately serious a menace it is that hangs over us; and I feel thatone of the first acts of the Administration, after it has succeeded inputting grape juice into the Constitution as our national tipple, andconstructed a solid Portland cement wall across the Vice President'sthorax to insure that promised four years of silence, should be aneffort to control this terrible situation."
"You talk as if it could be done," said the Doctor doubtfully.
"Of course it can be done," said the Idiot. "Doctors being engaged inInter-State Commerce--"
"Doctors? Interstate Commerce?" cried Mr. Brief. "That's a new one onme, Mr. Idiot. Everybody is apparently in Interstate Commerce in youropinion. Seems to me it was only the other day that you spoke ofClairvoyants being in it."
"Sure," said the Idiot. "And it's the same way with the doctors. Inninety-nine cases out of a hundred, where a man passes from this stateinto the future state,
you'll find a doctor mixed up in it somewhere,even if it's only as a coroner. This being so, it would be perfectlyproper to refer the matter to the Interstate Commerce Commission for asolution.
"Anyhow, something ought to be done to handle the situation while themenace is in its infancy. We need the ounce of prevention. Now, mysuggestion would be that the law should step in and either place a limitto the number of doctors to be turned out annually, on a basis of somany doctors to so many hundreds of population--say three doctors toevery hundred people--just as in certain communities the excise lawallows only one saloon for every thousand registered voters; or else,since the State permits medical schools to operate under a charter,authorizing them to manufacture physicians and surgeons ad lib., andturn them loose on the public, the State should provide work for thesedoctors to do.
"To this end we might have, for instance, a Bureau of DiseaseDissemination, subject perhaps to the jurisdiction of the Secretary ofthe Interior, under whose direction, acting in cooeperation with theDepartment of Agriculture, every package of seeds sent out by aCongressman to his constituents would have a sprinkling of germs of onekind or another mixed in with the seeds, thus spreading little epidemicsof comparatively harmless disorders like the mumps, the measles, or thepip, around in various over-healthy communities where the doctors werein danger of going over the hill to the poorhouse. Surely if we arejustified in making special efforts to help the farmers we ought not tohesitate to do the doctors a good turn once in a while."
"You think the public would stand for that, do you?" queried theBibliomaniac scornfully.
"Oh, the public is always inhospitable to new ideas at first," said theIdiot, "but after a while they get so attached to them that you have tostart an entirely new political party to prove that they arereactionary. But, as the Poet says,
"Into all lives some mumps must fall,
"and the sooner we get 'em over with the better. If the public oncewakes up to the fact that the measles and the mumps are as inevitable asa coal bill in winter, or an ice bill in summer, it will cheerfullyindorse a Federal Statute which enables us to have these things promptlyand be done with 'em. It's like any other disagreeable thing in life. Asold Colonel Macbeth used to say to that dear old Suffragette wife ofhis,
"If 'twere done when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly.
"It's like taking a cold bath in the morning. You don't mind it at allif you jump in in a hurry and then jump out again.
"But even if the public didn't take that sensible view of it, we havelegislative methods by which the thing could be brought about withoutthe public knowing anything about it. For instance, supposing somebodyin Congress were to introduce an innocent little bill appropriating fivehundred thousand dollars, for the erection of a residence for a UnitedStates Ambassador to the Commonwealth of California, for the avowedobject of keeping somebody in San Francisco to see that Governor Johnsondidn't declare war on Japan without due notice to the Navy Department,what could be simpler than the insertion in that bill of a little jokerproviding that from the date of the enactment of this statute theDepartment of Agriculture is authorized and required to expend the sumof twenty thousand dollars annually on the dissemination, throughCongressional seed packages, of not less than one ounce per package ofgerms of assorted infantile and other comparatively harmless disorders,for the benefit of the medical profession? Taxidermists tell us thatthere are more ways than one to skin a cat, and the same is true oflegislation.
"There's only one other way that I can see to bring the desiredcondition about, and that is to permit physicians to operate under thesame system of ethics as that to be found in the plumbing business. If aplumber is allowed, as he is allowed in the present state of publicmorality, to repair a leak in such a fashion to-day that new businessimmediately and automatically develops requiring his attentionto-morrow, I see no reason why doctors should not be permitted to do thesame thing. Called in to repair a mump, let him leave a measle behind.The measle cured, a few chicken-pox left carelessly about where theywill do the most good will insure his speedy return; and so on. Everyphysician could in this way take care of himself, and by a skilfulmanipulation of the germs within his reach should have no difficulty notonly in holding but in increasing his legitimate business as well."
"Ugh!" shuddered Mrs. Pedagog. "You almost make me afraid to let theDoctor stay in this house a day longer."
"Don't be afraid, Madame," said the Doctor amiably. "After all, I'm adoctor, you know, and not a plumber."
"I'll guarantee his absolute harmlessness, Mrs. Pedagog," said theIdiot. "We're perfectly safe here. It is no temptation to a doctor tosow the germs of disorder among people like ourselves who have reducedgetting free medical advice to a system."
"Well," said Mr. Brief, the lawyer, "your plan is all right for thedoctors, but why the Dickens don't somebody suggest something for uslawyers once in awhile? There were seventy thousand new lawyers turnedout yesterday, and you haven't even peeped."
"No," said the Idiot, "it isn't necessary. You lawyers are well providedfor. With one National Congress, and forty-eight separate StateLegislatures working twenty-four hours a day, turning out fifty-sevennew varieties of law every fifteen minutes, all so phrased that no humanmind can translate them into simple English, there's enough troubleconstantly on hand to keep twenty million lawyers busy for thirtymillion years, telling us not what we can't do, but what few thingsthere are left under the canopy that a man of religious inclinations cando without danger of arrest!"