DOCTORS AND NOVELISTS.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1350, 30 January 1912, Page 10

DOCTORS AND NOVELISTS.

Writing in the "Oornhill" on "Medicine in Fiction," Dr. S. Squire Spriggo makes {nil allowances for the author who introduces medical episodes merely to help his story along, without any pretence to authority in that field. It makes small difference to tho position of medicine in the public eye, lie thinks, that signs rightly attributable to ono poison, for instance, are transferred by a novelist to another, that the symptoms of a tropical disease are burlesqued, or the terrors' of a fever magnified. The reader knows that in actual life tho responsibilities in such -u» oupipaiu naq.tt. pig - uimu "0.1 . uol.ssojo.lcl oip spju.tto} sSatjaaj sit[ pnr: '»;{po[Aoirj( oijpuoios baui] oij.tt jo oip.iip.trn 9<[ BM;]nw tors into a talc in a large way, when the relations of the medical profession to the public are presumably expounded, there is need that the author be accurate. Yet ho is generally nothing of the. kind. "The novelist never seems to have the slightest knowledge of the professional medical life. He is ready enough to credit the members of the medical profession with many shining virtues, • and equally ready to darken their reputation with calumny, tho unfortunate result being to leave upon the public mind tho impression that tho average medical man is not an average member of society. The idea which the public might well derive from reading many novels is that to call in a doctor is an extraordinarily fluky proceeding, as the medical profession is divided sharply into heroes and knaves. 'The heroes lead a strenuous life, succoring... the .sick in. desperate circumstances and refusing fees; operating at the briefest notice when a hair's breadth to the right or left in the making of an incision w"ould"bo certain death to the patient; : The knaves murder, cozen, and keep bogus sanatoria." Specifically, tho writer suggests that it may be necessary to suppress the picture of the great specialist in brain diseases, passing from bed to bed in his world-fa-mous ward, surrounded by a crowd nf enthusiastic students, to whom ho discourses with elegant brutality. Nor do intelligent internes reverse the treatment of their superiors, and by saving life with brilliant _ unorthodoxy, succeed at once to lucrative practices. No great consulting position, we are gravely assured, was ever won in this way. Nuyscs in hos. pitols have to do "as they are told. The devoted young women ; who remains by a sufferer's pillow hour after hour and ciav after day until she wins a hand-to-hand fight with Fate, is a figment—in hospitals all nurses go to their meals anil beds at stated times. Dr. Sprigge complains that tho callousness of hospital nurses has more than once been the subject of newspaper comment, and holds that such a view lias been largely derived from the imnressions of patients, who. "fooled by fiction, have thought that a broken leg or a scalp-wound would entitle the sufferer to the exclusive posses, sion night and day of a soft-voiced min- j istoring angel, and who liavo resented , their particular nngel going to her ten." | Donbtless all professions could cite mis. ; representations by fiction writers as gross i os these. But it is easier to live thejn | down than to effect the revolution that alone could prevent, them.