A newspaper report, which reads as though it were based upon full information, says that the Board of Managers of the Mount Vernon Hospital, in Westchester County, has refused to admit any homœopathic physicians to the house staff of the hospital, and that the homœopathic doctors of Mount Vernon are very wroth in consequence. They say that part of the money for the hospital was contributed by persons of homœopathic preferences, who expected that their doctors should "have a hack" (as the vulgar put it) at some of the patients. But the regulars will not have it so. They are in, and have succeeded, with the connivance of the Board of Managers, in devoting the entire hospital to allopathic experiments, and Westchester County resounds in consequence with homœopathic lamentations.
So runs the newspaper's story, and it all sounds credible, because it is not really a new story, but an old and familiar one in a new setting. It is a sad plight for those homœopaths, for their case is probably hopeless, since all followers of Hahnemann will agree that there is only one thing that is harder to get out of a hospital than an allopathic doctor, and that of course is his patient. Not but that a homœopath is just as bad if once he gets a footing inside. The truth of the matter seems to be that physicians are very troublesome in hospitals anyway. A suspicion is current that in a hospital that accepts his gratuitous services a doctor is only saved by grace and wisdom from being an egregious despot. Grace and wisdom are vouchsafed to physicians in comparatively ample measure, but occasionally one of them misses his share, and if he is a hospital doctor, it is only a question of how long it will take him to get the hospital into the newspapers, or at least into bankruptcy. The only thing that ever stumps a hospital doctor is his Board of Managers. Usually he has his board under abject control, but once in a great while the two come to loggerheads and have to be separated. There is a hospital in (or very near) New York in which this happened not long ago. Owing to some lack of humility on the part of the board, the entire outfit of physicians resigned, and the board had to hire a substitute to do their work. At last accounts that hospital was still open and apparently doing a fairly successful business.
Doctors have improved in some respects since they dropped the tonsorial end of their vocation, but in many particulars they have retrograded. They know more than they used to. They cure now in a good many cases wherein their predecessors usually killed. But since they have given up shaving and cutting hair they have lost very much of their old-time meekness. They are not as good gossips as they were either, and they cost a great deal more than they did. There are occasional signs of dissatisfaction with them. The faith-curists, for instance, are persuaded that they are no good, and an odd story comes from London that the Duke of Westminster, one of the greatest of London landlords, is tired of the whole healing brood, and has given orders to his agents to make no new lease of any house of his to any surgeon, physician, medical man, or dentist. No one has guessed as yet just what has set the duke against the doctors, and he himself declines to explain, but it seems obvious enough that he has had his eye on them, and has determined that doctors and dukes cannot thrive in the same neighborhood, because there is not power enough to go around. He has noticed, of course, that any doctor has more real power than any duke, and perhaps he does not like it.
