52 Add: Of course the doctors confirmed all this with an air of importance and encouraged her in the belief. She would have been glad not to be afraid, but the doctor dropped a word or two about “blood-poisoning”, “scarlatina”, or (God forbid) “dysentery” – and it was all up! Nor could it be otherwise. You see, if among us women had, as in olden times, a belief that “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away”, that a young child’s angel-soul goes to God and it is better for him – the dead child – to die in innocence than to die later on in sin, and so forth, which is what people did believe, you know – if they had any faith of that sort, they could bear the children’s illnesses more quietly; but now there is nothing of that sort left – not a trace of it. There is no belief of that kind. But one must have faith in something, and they have faith – a senseless faith – in medicine – and not even in medicine but in doctors. One woman in I. I., and another in P. P.; and like religious believers they do not see the absurdity of their faith but believe quia absurdum. You know, if they did not believe irrationally, they would see the absurdity of what those brigands prescribe – the whole of it. Scarlatina is an infectious disease; on account of it, in a large town, half the family has to move into an hotel (they twice made us move in that way). But, you see, everyone in a town is a centre of innumerable diameters which carry the threads of all kinds of infection, and there is no possibility of avoiding them: the baker, the tailor, the laundress, and the cabman. So that for everyone who moves out of his own house to another place to escape an infection he knows of, I will undertake to find, in that other place, another infection – if not the very same infection – as near at hand. But that is not enough. We all know of rich people who after diphtheria have had everything in their house destroyed, and in that house when freshly done up, have themselves fallen ill; and we all know of dozens of people who have remained with the sick ones and have not been infected. And so it is with everything; one only need keep one’s ears open. One woman tells another that her doctor is a good one. The other replies: “What are you saying? Why, he killed so-and-so.” And vice versa. Well, bring a country doctor to a lady and she won’t trust him; but bring another doctor in a carriage, who knows precisely as much and who treats his patients on the basis of the same books and the same experiments, and tell her that he must be paid £10 for each visit, and she will believe in him. The root of the matter is that our women are savages. They have no faith in God, and so some of them believe in an evil eye cast by wicked people and others in Doctor I. P. because he charges high fees. If they had faith they would know that scarlatina and so forth is not at all so terrible, for it cannot injure what one can and should love – namely, the soul, and that sickness and death which none of us can avoid may occur. But as there is no faith in God they only love physically and all their energy is directed towards preserving life, which cannot be done, and which only the doctors assure fools, and especially she-fools, that they can save. And so they have to be called in. Therefore having children, far from improving our relations to one another, did not unite us but on the contrary divided us.
