19Of course, the college clinic is supposed to be a theater of instruction. Often, however, it is but a stage on which comedy-dramas are enacted. A brilliant operation that nobody six feet away can see, and an operator bellowing at his audience like the traditional bull of Basham—in medical terms that confuse but do not enlighten, terms that are Greek to most of the listeners—this is the little comedy-drama that is enacted for students who have eyes but see not; who have ears but hear not. Instruction? Bah! Take the theatric elements and the plays to the gallery out of some college clinics and there wouldn’t be a corporal’s guard in attendance. Worse than the free clinics are the so-called charitable hospitals. Much has been said of dispensary abuses, but few have had the courage to say anything in adverse criticism of these institutions. While nominally founded to fill “a long-felt want”—and the number of long-felt wants, from the hospital standpoint, is legion—these hospitals are founded on strictly business principles, save in this respect—the people who found them feed on their innate capacity to get something for nothing. The first thing the founders do is to get a staff of doctors to pull the hospital chestnuts out of the fire. The members of the staff think that the hospital is performing the same duty for them, and everything is serene. And so the surgeon goes on operating on twenty patients—fifteen of whom are able to pay him a fee—in the hope that one among them all is willing to pay him a fee. Exaggeration? Well, I cannot swear to the accuracy of the foregoing, but an eastern surgeon of world-wide 20fame once told me that for every patient who paid him a fee he operated on nineteen for nothing; and this man has no public clinic, either. Is it conceivable that the nineteen free patients are all paupers? Many of them go to my friend for operation from very long distances. Ought the railroads and hospitals to have all the profits? Have we not all had similar experiences in a lesser degree? With the development of charitable hospitals far in excess of any legitimate demand, it has come to pass that surgery is almost a thing unknown in general city practice. Even the minor operations have left the general practitioner—to return no more so long as there are free hospitals and dispensaries. Where is the emergency surgery, of which, in former days, every practitioner had his share? Railroaded off to the “charity” hospitals to be cared for gratis.