“Why do you assume you have the right to decide for someone else? Don't you agree it's a terrifying right, one that rarely leads to good? You should be careful. No one's entitled to it, not even doctors.”

“But doctors are entitled to the right – doctors above all,” exclaimed Dontsova with deep conviction. By now she was really angry. “Without that right there'd be no such thing as medicine!”

The slave doctor prescribes what mere experience suggests – and when he has given his orders, like a tyrant, he rushes off. But the other doctor, who is a freeman, attends and practices upon freemen – he enters into a discourse with the patient and with his friends – and he will not prescribe for him until he has first convinced him: at last, when he has brought the patient more and more under his persuasive influences and set him on the road to health, he attempts to effect a cure.