32
PARTISAN REVIEW
that she had positively aborted when actually the baby was quite
intact, of E. being told the discomforts of a large tumor were
psy–
chological and of R. being told his gastro-intestinal upset was very
likely a cancer! Doctors are human; they have their right to make
mistakes of diagnosis and treatment but in no one of these instances
-and I could cite a dozen others-was there sufficient investigation
to support the doctor's conclusion. Common to all of these errors
were three things: medical arrogance, medical carelessness and a
complete disregard for the feelings of the patient-they are the atti–
tudes which seem to me to be daily more evident among New York
doctors, men who have been trained in the best medical schools in
the country, men of presumably the highest personal integrity.
There is but one physician of my acquaintance who makes less
than $30,000 a year; the really successful doctors earn two and three
times that much. Is there a connection between these large incomes
which doctors now can earn and the decline in professional standards?
I have never held with the idea that the more socially useful a pro–
fession, the less it should look for in monetary reward; yet I come
strongly to doubt whether it can be healthy for a doctor to earn quite
this much money. Maybe one has to stay just a
little
bit poor in
order to stay decent. Mter all, it is natural that a man who can
make $40,000 a year in his practice should come to suppose that he
must always be right; else why would he be so successful? He is
without the impulse to think hard in order to prove himself; he is
already proved.
This is perhaps most apparent-this corruption by success–
among psychoanalysts: certainly in this especially lucrative branch
of the medical profession, money seems to play at least as large a
part in the ever-increasing irresponsibility of the practitioners as the
dissidences which make analysis anybody's plaything. When a young
man has only to be out of medical school four or five years to be
virtually guaranteed forty or fifty thousand dollars a year, more
than his normal latent greed would have had to be eradicated in
his training in order for his character not to deteriorate; he would
also have had to be indoctrinated with an abnormal humility, which
is scarcely the business of a training analysis. I remember the party
of fledgling analysts
L.
and I went to a year or so ago. The apart-
