But with heart and with glass filled chock to the brim,
Here’s luck to the under dog.”
CHAPTER XV
MEDICAL “STEERERS” AND THEIR WORK
Every doctor has his steerers, people who drum up business for him. In many instances it is a service willingly performed out of real affection and confidence in the skill and ability of the physician. The latter is unconscious of any such influence being exerted in his behalf until he is told by some new patient, “I was advised to come to you by Mr. ——, who says you are the only man who ever did him any good.” This is “steering,” legitimate, unpaid-for steering. The doctor is, of course, grateful to Mr. ——, or ought to be, but it is seldom that he gives the matter a second thought.
Then there is another kind of “steering,” the cold, commercial variety in which the labors of the steerer, if they are successful, are rewarded in coin of the realm. Nearly every advertising physician—and some who do not advertise—has one or more of the genus “steerer” on his staff.
There is just as much caste, just as pronounced a social distinction in this calling as there is in the medical profession itself. The cheap doctor has cheap, rough steerers; the doctor who is higher up in the social scale has smooth diplomats in his employ. The object of all is the same—to get business for their employer, and the more business they get the larger are their incomes.
There are some steerers who think themselves well repaid if they are handed a dollar for each patient they land in the office of the physician who employs them. These are the men who can approach only a cheap class of people to whom a five dollar fee is the limit.
The better class of steerers, the men who work for the big fee getters, scorn a salary, or a stated amount for each patient. They prefer a percentage, usually one-quarter of the fee secured from the patient. There are men in Chicago who are making $150 a week in this occupation.
Go into the rotunda of any first-class hotel in Chicago, New York, or some other large city and affect to walk lame as if afflicted with locomotor ataxia, or make up to resemble a confirmed invalid. It will not be long before you will be approached by some well-dressed, prosperous-looking individual who will say: