“Why not? The physician who has diagnosed the trouble and finds that an operation is necessary may have paid only two or three visits to the patient at $2 or $3 a visit. The result is that, honestly, he must give his patient over to a surgeon. ‘What surgeon?’ is asked most frequently by the patient. Honestly the doctor names a man who has taken many cases from him and most successfully. But where the physician gets $8 or $10, the surgeon may get $150, $300, or $500. And—except for the physician—the surgeon never would have heard of the patient.”
“It’s all fair enough if openly above board,” said Dr. Evans, in reply to the same question. “It would be a most logical thing in business, only that the public is not prepared to compare business with the professions of medicine and surgery. When it comes home that both doctor and surgeon must be assured of a living, however, the fact is a jar to the purely ethical.”
Another physician said: “I have just had an experience along the line of the split fee. An old doctor friend of mine discovered the presence of gall stones in his patient. It is a difficult thing to diagnose with certainty. My friend, however, made no mistake and received $25 from the wealthy patient. The surgeon who operated in the comparatively simple case got a fee of $500. It would have been only fair for the physician to have received part of that $500 fee, and I think he was a chump if he did not get it.”
“But you can’t put a profession on a business basis,” shriek the high moguls of ethics. Why not? On this subject Prof. George Burman Foster, of the University of Chicago, speaks plainly, as follows:
“What is the difference between a profession and a business? Is it, as was once thought, that the former is fulfilled by the mind and the latter by the body? But, for example, dentistry is quite manual and engineering or carpentry quite mental as well. Besides, the old idea of a dualism between mind and body is no longer held by the modern man. Then is the difference that the profession is ‘learned’ but the business is not?
“But we have men who are not college graduates entering the professions, while business of a higher order is clamoring for college graduates. Besides, we have changed our notion of what constitutes ‘learning’ and concluded that the man who by experience has learned ‘life’ may know quite as much as the man who has learned books in the school. But is the difference, then, that the professional man receives a special professional training, while the business man does not? But farmers are going to agricultural schools, while the majority of preachers still do not go to a theological school!
“Shall we say that the professional man is distinguished by eminent character and ability, while the business man is not? Hardly. We know that while the business principle is pagan and not Christian to-day, still the average business man is quite as good as the average professional man, no matter what the profession may be.
“Who deserves more honor—the farmer who provides us with our daily bread, or the dentist who keeps our teeth so that we can eat it, or the physician our stomach so that we can digest it?
“The best sign of our time is the growing sense of the worth of the profane, of the secular, and a growing depreciation of what once was called ‘sacred’ and ‘holy.’ To be sure, of the professions the ‘clerical’ is still regarded as ‘sacred;’ but since the religion of the future is to be a secular religion, the ‘sacredness’ of the ministerial office will in time pass away.
“The students in our schools to-day are taught this. They see that the distinction between profession and business is at last only traditional. They are bent on fulfilling the task which is in accord with the incentive and legislation of their special natures and characters. They know of something above the old honor of the profession and the new money of the business—namely: the unfolding of moral personality and the service of their brothers.