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The situation was saved when Sir Almroth Wright pointed out that if you inoculated a patient with pathogenic germs at a moment when his powers of cooking them for consumption by the phagocytes was receding to its lowest point, you would certainly make him a good deal worse and perhaps kill him, whereas if you made precisely the same inoculation when the cooking power was rising to one of its periodical climaxes, you would stimulate it to still further exertions and produce just the opposite result. And he invented a technique for ascertaining in which phase the patient happened to be at any given moment. The dramatic possibilities of this discovery and invention will be found in my play. But it is one thing to invent a technique: it is quite another to persuade the medical profession to acquire it. Our general practitioners, I gather, simply declined to acquire it, being mostly unable to afford either the acquisition or the practice of it when acquired. Something simple, cheap, and ready at all times for all corners, is, as I have shewn, the only thing that is economically possible in general practice, whatever may be the case in Sir Almroth’s famous laboratory in St. Mary’s Hospital. It would have become necessary to denounce opsonin in the trade papers as a fad and Sir Almroth as a dangerous man if his practice in the laboratory had not led him to the conclusion that the customary inoculations were very much too powerful, and that a comparatively infinitesimal dose would not precipitate a negative phase of cooking activity, and might induce duce a positive one. And thus it happens that the refusal of our general practitioners to acquire the new technique is no longer quite so dangerous in practice as it was when The Doctor’s Dilemma was written: nay, that Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington’s way of administering inoculations as if they were spoonfuls of squills[138] may sometimes work fairly well. For all that, I find Sir Almroth Wright, on the 23rd May, 1900, warning the Royal Society of Medicine that “the clinician has not yet been prevailed upon, to reconsider his positon,” which means that the general practitioner (“the doctor,” as he is called in our homes) is going on just as he did before, and could not afford to learn or practice a new technique even if he had ever heard of it. To the patient who does not know about it he will say nothing. To the patient who does, he will ridicule it, and disparage Sir Almroth. What else can he do, except confess his ignorance and starve?
But now please observe how “the whirligig of time brings its revenges.”[139] This latest discovery of the remedial virtue of a very, very tiny hair of the dog that bit you reminds us, not only of Arndt’s law of protoplasmic reaction to stimuli, according to which weak and strong stimuli provoke opposite reactions, but of Hahnema
Add to the newly triumphant homeopathist and the opsonist that other remarkable i
By the time this preface is in print the kaleidoscope may have had another shake; and opsonin may have gone the way of phlogiston[140]at the hands of its own restless discoverer. I will not say that Hahnema
Lest this should seem too rhetorical a conclusion for our professional men of science, who are mostly trained not to believe anything unless it is worded in the jargon of those writers who, because they never really understand what they are trying to say, ca
1. Nothing is more dangerous than a poor doctor: not even a poor employer or a poor landlord.
2. Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.
138
Medicinal syrup derived from the squill plant, a bulbous herb.
139
hus Feste gloats over Malvolio’s humiliation in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (act 5,cene I ) .
140
Hypothetical substance thought to be released through burning, a theory disproved by French chemist Antoine Lavoisier (1743- 1794).
141
In Moliere’s play The Imaginary Invalid (1673) a doctor who disdains such new fangled theories as circulation of the blood.
142
Sixteenth-century German alchemist and physician.