The results of combination in trade and the income from professional labor are issues from distinct and opposite sources and have no right to be compared or made the subject of invidious reflection. A number of lawyers, each an expert in a special department, may form a partnership, occupy a common office, each helping the other, the emoluments going to the common fund. This is a sort of combine. But the time is not yet ripe, and probably will never come, for the incorporation of a great Medical Trust, with the names of a specialist in eye, ear, throat, nose, lungs, liver, sphincter ani, corns and fallopian tubes, and so on to the minutest subdivision, with the addition of some general practitioners and apothecaries, displayed around the casings of some common front door, to scoop in the community and pool the receipts on a graded tariff. Trade is essentially selfish and works for the individual. “If you don’t work for number one, number two will be working for you.” The accumulation of money is neither end nor contingent in professional life. The pursuit and application of medical science are on the higher level with the learning of jurists, scientists, educators and literateurs, whose mission is the unselfish search for knowledge for the immediate benefit of mankind and the advance of civilization.
While it is true that very few in any calling “lay by at interest enough to live on,” a very small number of that few do actually retire from active work and live on that interest, and this for two reasons: First, a man in successful professional life is in receipt of an income which enables him to live in luxurious surroundings, gratify tastes and enjoy recreation, which income, considered as interest, would represent a capital sum exceptional even among the results of successful trade, stock gambling or railroad wrecking. Such a man, and he is one of many, could live on what he “has laid by at interest,” if he saw fit to live in less luxury and sacrifice the gratification of tastes which have been cultivated and become necessary to his comfort. He could live on his interest, but he does not care to live in idleness. On the other hand, the conditions of a cultured life are of an ever widening horizon, and it is characteristic of medical men that their intellectual sense is inquisitive, keen, appreciative and alert in their own sphere of action, less satisfied with what is and more anxious for better results, beyond the genius of any other professional life, and this for the distinctive reason that every new discovery in medical science promotes accuracy in the application of medical art. Working becomes a passion with medical men; the more they know the more eager they are to work. This passion is not to “lay by at interest enough to live on.”