But how is this recognition of the duty and glory of the sacrifice of health and life at the call of every higher law to be reconciled with the “Doctor’s Doctrine” that the interests of health are so supreme that they themselves constitute the highest law, and render any practice conducive to them ipso facto lawful? Either we must admit, according to the Divine’s Doctrine, that moral interests transcend bodily interests, or we must hold, according to Doctor’s Doctrine, that bodily interests transcend moral interests. There is no third alternative. One principle or the other must prevail, and sooner or later leaven society with its ennobling or else its debasing influence. There are signs apparent that the Doctor’s Doctrine is already bearing its proper fruit, and that, soothed by a becalmed conscience, absolved by the authority of the priesthood of Science, men and women are beginning to be systematically selfish and self-indulgent where their health is concerned, or where there may appear a chance of curing their maladies in modes not hitherto witnessed. I can only indicate a few of the ways in which this deliberate self-preservation is exhibited.
Notably, it seems that the old courage of Englishmen is dwindling away. Almost every month, cases come to light wherein men, even soldiers, fail to stand by their comrades in danger; or wherein a crowd of fifty people witness a child drowning in a shallow pond without an effort to save it; or men who witness a cruel murder rush from the spot, leaving the yet breathing victim dying unaided on the ground. There is even, among young men, a cynical avowal of prudent concern for their own lives and limbs which constantly strikes the old, who remember the joyous youthful fearlessness of their fathers, as something altogether new and far indeed from pleasant to contemplate.
Nor are our personal acts of selfishness and cowardice on a small scale the only logical consequences of the new principle which are already visible. Cruelty of the most heinous and systematic kind is another result. The unanimous resolution passed by the great Medical Congress in the year of grace 1881 has proclaimed that vivisection leads to discoveries conducive to the cure of disease, and therefore should be sanctioned and left unrestricted by law. That is to say, that all the fiendish imaginations of men like Mantegazza and Schiff, and Goltz and Bernard, and Paul Bert, should be freely permitted in England for the sake of a chance of useful hints for therapeutic science. Thus, the whole medical profession in England stands committed to the demand that the vice of cruelty in young men and old should be deliberately unchained, expressly for the sake of anticipated benefits to bodily health.
So far indeed has Doctor’s Doctrine made its way that, whenever any Bill concerning sanitary measures or public hygiene is before Parliament, there is exhibited by the speakers in the House, and by the journalists who discuss the matter, a readiness to trample on personal rights to an extent which would excite indignation, were any religious or commercial interest in question. Men may spread the most deadly moral diseases, and teach doctrines which make virtue a mockery and life a hopeless desolation, and scarcely an effort is made to stop them. But let them threaten to spread bodily disease, and (unless they be medical men, and thus authorized transmitters of infection) the most stringent measures are adopted; and besides a Compulsory Vaccination Act and the ever-infamous Contagious Diseases Acts, even while these sheets are passing through the press, no less than three Bills are before Parliament to make compulsory the notification of infectious disease and segregation of infected persons. I am not now discussing the merits of these Acts and Bills: I am only observing that the spirit wherewith they are carried forward is quite an innovation in English legislation. Health of body has been accorded the importance which the—real or supposed—interests of the soul alone commanded two centuries ago; and the tyranny of the priesthood of Hygeia threatens to be as high-handed as ever was that of the Churches of Rome or of Geneva.
Lastly there is, outside of legislation, and hidden from the knowledge of the majority of the laity, one remaining application of the new principle of morals which more than all exhibits its evil, its disastrous tendency. For obvious reasons, I cannot write plainly of this moral poisoning, which I believe to be going on to a frightful extent, both in this country and abroad. I can only quote some observations made on it by an experienced minister of religion, published in the Modern Review for April, 1880:—
Any one who will make a few casual inquiries will be amazed to discover the frequency with which medical men of high repute—men who are admitted to the friendship of good and unsuspecting women—offer counsel to young men, and even to boys, which strikes at the root of all morality, and indeed can proceed from nothing else than scepticism concerning the very possibility of morality itself. We speak what we know not of one, but of many, and what no medical man will deny, though many a medical man will revolt from the action of his fellow-practitioners as vehemently as we ourselves. What we ask of these purer spirits in the healing fraternity is that they will speak out on this and other matters of professional practice, and condemn their less honorable colleagues with no faltering tongue.
The Bishop of Bedford taking the chair at the meeting, May 3 of the present year (1882), of the Social Purity Alliance, alluded to this heavy charge against the medical profession in the following terms: “I know what doctors say, and I here publicly protest against the terrible thing that is often said by doctors to young men,—that sin is good for their health. I say God forgive those who have said it.”
But it will be replied: “All these evils have existed for ages. There have always been found selfish, cruel, cowardly, and profligate men, ready to transgress when their inclinations goaded them, willing to rank their own health, life, and enjoyment far before the law of God or the interest of their fellows. What signifies, then, a new formula of selfishness?”
It signifies, I venture to say, a great deal. Hitherto, men did evil; but they (or their neighbors for them) had at least the grace to recognize that it was evil. The selfish man was charged with selfishness. The cruel man did not assume the airs of a benefactor of mankind. The coward was kicked as a poltroon, not rewarded with sympathetic smiles for his candor. The man who sought the dens of vice did not go thither with his conscience pacified by his physician’s orders in his pocket. To teach men that “a practice conducive to health is ipso facto morally right” is then, at one and the same moment, to damp every aspiration after the nobler kinds of virtue, and to supply a justification for every meaner kind of vice.
Neither selfishness, nor cowardice, nor cruelty, nor unchastity, can be justifiable by the plea that they may conduce to the bodily health of one man or of a thousand men; and he who will save his life by such means will assuredly lose all that makes “life worth living,” all for which life was given.