they were useful, necessary, you might say indispensable (in the same way that the world has always been full of mountebanks, miracle-men, homoeopaths and allopaths, and always will be), because they satisfied the psychological yearnings of the patient and those who loved her. They satisfied the eternal human need to go on hoping for relief, the need for sympathy and for someone to do something that is felt by any suffering individual. They satisfied the eternal human need – seen at its simplest in a little child – to be rubbed where it hurts.
