As if to point a moral, I have been here interrupted by a pitiful voice over the telephone. Indeed for a week past, I have been its victim at varying intervals. For Mrs. Cholmondeley, let us call her, cannot make up her mind between the rival hygienic attractions of Cannes and Torquay. As a matter of fact Camberwell or Camden Town would be equally, probably more, effectual. Organically she is perfectly sound. For the rest she is merely over-fed and under-occupied. She has deleted very nearly every healthful activity from her list of physical employments. And now those of her will are to be similarly abandoned; delegated to paid assistants like myself.
Cannes or Torquay? Well, I have refused the responsibility of deciding. In league with her long-suffering family physician, I am endeavouring to force her faculties to make this little effort by themselves. For I doubt if the sorrowful gates of illness behold anything more entirely pitiable than the spectacle of a will on crutches.
Well then, having, as you see, completely foisted the ultimate issue upon your own shoulders, it seems to me that there are three main standpoints from which you must regard our profession before finally deciding to embark upon it. To take the least important of these first, you must bear in mind, I think, that while you should undoubtedly be able to pay your way, and to make an honest living, yet the financial rewards that medicine has to offer are scarcely worth considering. Given an equal amount of capital, both in brain-power and pounds sterling, your hours of work, your expenditure of energy, your capacity for diagnosis and research, your readiness at the reading of human nature, would bring you a far greater return of this world's goods in almost any other occupation that you care to name—incomparably so in commerce. At the same time I don't think that this point of view will detain you very long; because, however little fathers may really know of their own sons (and the sum of parental ignorance under this heading must be something rather stupendous), I am quite sure that the financial laurel, per se, has no overwhelming attraction for you.
Having deigned then to consider the problem from this lowest and most sordid standpoint, you should shift your ground, I think, and reflect upon it from the midmost of my three Pisgahs, the scientific one. If I haven't led you to this first, it is because you have probably scrambled up it already, and paid no attention at all to the one that I have just recommended to you. And in a sense your instinct will perhaps have taken you by a straighter route to the heart of this matter than that which your more prudent parent has indicated. Because ultimately it is from this point that you will have to make your final decision. You must ask yourself, with all the earnestness of a novice at his altar-vigil, "Am I prepared to know?"
For the long day of the charlatan and the quack is drawing at last to its close, and their sun is even now setting in a blaze of patent-medicine advertisements. Modern Europe has almost ceased to be possible for the would-be Paracelsus; even America will not contain him, I think, for very much longer. And through a dissolving mist of white spats and atrocious Latin the eyes of humanity are turning slowly, but very surely, towards the man who knows. Are you prepared to become such a man?
I fancy that I can see your forehead wrinkling a little here; so let me explain myself in a parable. There is an old story, familiar in the hospitals, of a bygone practitioner whose simple habit it was to tie a piece of string about the waist of his patient. He would then ask the sufferer to locate the pain. If this were above the string he administered an emetic, if below a purgative; while if the pain and the string coincided, the unhappy victim would receive both. Now it is melancholy to reflect that this gentleman has never been without disciples. And yet how difficult at times may it become to avoid such a fate. Are you prepared to avoid it?
Let me put the question in yet another shape. Some day a patient will come to you—you may be quite certain that he will—at the end of a long round or an exhausting afternoon at hospital; will complain to you of his lamentable depression of spirits, his entire loss of appetite, his slight but continual headache; and will show you, in confirmation of these symptoms, nothing graver, let us say, than a dull eye and a yellowish tongue. You will be tired; you will see at a glance that his subjective troubles are altogether disproportionate to the objective gravity of his complaint, and perhaps justifiably you will send him away happy, or at any rate contented, in the belief that he is a bit "liverish." But are you going to allow "liverish" to satisfy yourself? "Of course not," you reply; and yet, believe me, my son, it will be a very real temptation. Why bother, at a long day's end, to worry your tired faculties into presenting to your mind as exact a mental picture of the man's actual condition as they can draw? Nevertheless, unless you do this, you will be treating him with less respect than your old bicycle in the coach-house; as though, if it should creak or wheeze or begin to run less smoothly, you would merely tell yourself that it was "wheelish," and drop oil at random into its most convenient aperture. Do you begin to see what I am driving at?
And then you will probably turn upon me and say, "But to cultivate this habit of forming proper mental pictures, I shall have to be at least a chemist, a physicist, a pathologist, a bacteriologist, to say nothing of a philosopher; and how can a single human being, however industrious, contain as many persons as these?" And of course he cannot. Upon no more than one branch of the tree of Healing will it be given to you to climb out a little farther than your fellows; but, at any rate, you can keep your eye upon the others. It is in this way alone that you can become a scientific physician in the best and broadest sense. And you can take my word for it that it will never be worth your while to become any other sort of a sawbones—an exacting prospect? I agree with you. And many an hour will come to you with the easy question, "Why lavish all this time and trouble in gathering up some very trifling grain of extra knowledge—knowledge that, in all probability, will never become of the least importance in your hands?"
And then, perhaps, a moment will flash into your life when this very grain shall shape a million destinies. Are you prepared to live for that moment?