DOCTORS AND THEIR WORK.
Doctors and their Work. By Robert Brudenell Carter. (Smith, Elder, and Co. 6s.)—From the layman's point of view, this must be accounted one of the most sensible and practical books dealing
with medicine, disease, and quackery that have ever been pub- lished. There is no " nonsense " about it, sentimental or professional. Dr. Carter has not much more patience with the vendor of a quack medicine than he has with the almost typical patient who, being troubled with a headache, sends for the doctor thinking that " a doctor ought to know what is' good for' a head- ache, and ought to provide something in a bottle or in a pill-box which being duly swallowed will not only serve a notice of eject- ment upon the headache, but will also see the notice is complied with." Dr. Brudenell Carter's preliminary chapters, in particular, are very good and to the point ; they deal with present-day training for the medical profession, the actual work of medical students, professional hindrances, and similar subjects. Dr. Carter does not disguise his opinion that during the last half- century, and coincidently with great advances in medical know- ledge, there has been a change definitely for the worse in the conduct of Medical education, and that "many of the accepted preliminary examinations are not of a character to afford con- vincing evidence of an education really calculated to prepare the minds of those who receive it for engaging in studies of an abstruse and difficult nature in which an absence of pro- ficiency might easily lead to disastrous consequences." Dr. Carter has great for saying sensible things in a sharp way, as when he writes that " the highest skill of the physician is to see the personality of the sick man through the malady and to recognise that he is called upon to treat a patient, not to cure a disease"; and that " the general basis of what may be compre- hensively called quackery consists in ignoring the actual patients in order to confine attention to the supposed disease." His own view of treating himself may be gathered from the following :— " If I do not feel well—not equal, that is, to my daily duties—the very last thing that would occur to me would be to dose myself with physic. I go to bed and restrict myself to such diet as mutton broth and custard pudding. If Nature has taken my case in hand as she generally has done, I am giving her all the help she wants in the shape of warmth, rest in the recumbent posture, and diminished work for the digestion. The next morning I wake up recovered ; or if I do not, I send for a doctor and do obediently as I am told, taking physic if it be given to me."
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