[XVIII]
To Robert Lynn, M.R.C.S., Applebrook, Devon.
91b Harley Street, W.,
June 25, 1910.
My dear Bob,
I have had a talk with Arthur, as you suggested, about his new appointment, and I think, on the whole, that he would be well advised to take it. As he said to me, poor boy, he has had just lately to readjust his future a bit, and the practice that he had thought of buying has ceased to have much attraction for him. And I needn't tell you again how very sorry I am that Molly, and perhaps to a lesser degree both Esther and myself, have been responsible for this. For you know quite well that there is nobody whom we would more gladly have welcomed as an extra son; and until quite lately we both fully believed—although we had never of course actually ascertained this—that Molly returned his feelings. Alas, however, for the best-laid plans—for since we discussed the matter at Applebrook, I have become almost certain that although her answer would be "yes" on every other ground but this, on this particular one she will never, I'm afraid, be able to meet him with open arms. The event may contradict me, but I think not. The divine spark has not yet touched her heart. And I know you are with me in believing that she would be wrong, with all her youth in front of her, not to wait for it a little longer. And so Arthur, being robbed (but only for a time, I hope) of what he tells me sorrowfully was his raison d'être, has decided to postpone his début as a general practitioner—yet not without, unless I am very greatly mistaken, a certain secret atom of relief. For his real inclinations, I am sure, still centre in the laboratory and the microscope; and it was chiefly for financial reasons that he had abandoned any ideas of further dallying with them. He wanted to "do Molly," as he confided to me, "as well as he could"; and that would have been impossible, he was afraid, as a bacteriologist or pathologist. And there, from a strictly monetary standpoint, he was perhaps in the right. For though, as a profession (and through us, the great public), we must needs lean each year more heavily upon these skilled workers at our right hand, yet at present we are all very reluctant to give them their full dues either in professional éclat or pounds, shillings, and pence. All the same, their day is coming, if perhaps a little slowly; so that maybe, after all, Miss Molly's unintentional cruelty may prove to be an angel in mufti. And now that he is in no immediate need of earning more money than can comfortably support himself, I think that this new appointment, as assistant in the inoculation department, is just the job for him. It will mean of course two years of life; but he has already been a house-surgeon and a house-physician, and in any case a two years' training in the exactest of all scientific technique will not be a waste of time whatever his ultimate occupation is destined to be.
Moreover (though it is seldom wise to prophesy) I am becoming pretty thoroughly convinced that the future of medicine lies more wholly in the hands of the vaccino-therapists than any of us are as yet quite able to realise. For when one comes to think of it, although surgery, during the last fifty years, has been advancing by leaps and bounds, medicine has been standing very still indeed. Where it has moved at all it has been chiefly on the lines of improving its methods of diagnosis, while as regards treatment it has remained very nearly as empirical as it was a century ago. Perhaps this is rather a hard saying, but in the main I am quite sure that it is a true one. And I think its restoration to lively and effective growth will be more dependent upon the methods, so sound in their conception and so brilliant in their performance, of Sir Almroth Wright and his fellow-workers, at home and abroad, than upon any other factor now making for medical progress. As a school they are no doubt destined to confront a good many reverses. And they will presently be forced, I suspect, to re-state a certain number of their present beliefs. But their guiding principle is so essentially sane, so really scientific, in the true sense of an abused adjective, that I cannot think your boy will go far wrong in perfecting himself in their methods, and even perhaps deciding later to specialise altogether in this particular branch of medicine.
To determine by culture the precise organism that is causing a patient's malady (and how few are the diseases left to us that may be definitely classed as non-microbic); to learn by an examination of his blood-cells the exact condition of his resisting powers; and to increase these by carefully graduated doses of his own or similar bacteria until his newly stimulated anti-bodies have been so increased and fortified as to be able to win their own battle—it is a general method of treatment that seems to me to hold more palpably the key to future victory than any other. There's an infinity yet to be learned about it, of course. The mysteries of the anti-body have been scarcely fringed. And the technique is still so difficult that none but a highly trained man can be trusted with it. But if anybody is to win an ultimate triumph over incidental disease it is that trained man who is going to do it. And the sooner we consulting physicians learn rather to count him as a brother than a mere laboratory assistant, the better will it be for the march of light and healing. Amen. This little peroration was put into my head by a passage in an address that I heard delivered the other day at an evening lecture to post-graduates.
"Gentlemen," said the lecturer—a well-known provincial consultant, "I should like the day to dawn when I could be met at the door of my hospital by a trained chemist, a trained bacteriologist, a trained pathologist, so that when I came to some complicated case I could say, 'Chemist, a part of this problem is yours, take it and work it out. Bacteriologist, perform your share in elucidating this difficulty. Pathologist, advance, and do likewise.'"