The Healer. By Robert Herrick. (Macmillan and Co. Os.)— Many
curious lights are thrown upon the medical problems of America in Mr. Robert Herrick's new novel, The Healer. Most English readers, however, will think it an exaggeration of idealism for the hero to believe that doctors lose their ideals directly they make a paying business of healing. This reduced to its logical conclusion means that no doctor must expect any money for exercising his gifts, and we have the highest Scriptural authority for believing that the labourer is worthy of his hire. Whether, as Dr. Holden, "the healer," seems to think, it would be easier for medical men to keep their ideals if they were paid by salary is a problem which the working of Mr. Lloyd George's Insurance Act may help to solve, though ideals are apt to be dissipated when their owners are not paid a living wage. The only sensible method of settling the vexed question would be to adopt the Chinese plan, which is, perhaps, at the foundation of the Insurance Act. Every one would choose his own doctor and pay him a salary as long as he (the patient) continued well. The salary would stop immediately if the doctor allowed him to become ill. But then who would judge whether the patient had or had not broken the doctor's rules ? Apart from this question, The Healer oontains an account of the growth of a sanatorium in a wild part of America, and the character studies of Holden and his commonplace little Society wife, Nellie, are excellently drawn. Nellie, under the stress of her love for Holden, has courage enough to cut loose from all the ties which bind her to ordinary conventional city life, but with the birth of her child she longs once more for the fleshpots of Egypt, and it is obvious to tho reader that the marriage is bound to be a failure. The book will be acceptable to English readers, partly as well-written fiction and partly because it shows, perhaps unintentionally, the great differences between life in America and in England.
Previous page
