The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors

The preface presents a sustained critique of contemporary medical practice, arguing that financial incentives and professional routine distort judgement and encourage excessive operations and risky interventions; it questions whether most practitioners are true scientists, characterizing much bacteriology and therapeutic fashion as a kind of popular superstition, and condemns the normalization of vivisection and other cruelties. It examines statistical illusions around vaccination and inoculation, the social and economic causes of medical poverty and success, the limitations of technical remedies, and urges reorganization of medical services with greater lay involvement and social solutions to reduce harm and better meet public needs.