I wonder why you can always read a doctor’s bill and you can never read his prescription.

Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936), the Chicago journalist and humorist best known for his “Mr. Dooley” newspaper sketches, frequently satirized everyday institutions—politics, business, and professional authority—through the voice of an Irish-American bartender-philosopher. This quip belongs to a long-running early-20th-century comic complaint about physicians’ illegible handwriting and the asymmetry between what patients can clearly understand (the charges) and what they cannot (the medical instructions). In Dunne’s milieu, the joke also plays on growing public skepticism toward professional mystique: doctors’ prescriptions, written in opaque Latin abbreviations and hurried script, could feel like a private code, while the bill arrived in plain, unmistakable figures.

The line contrasts two kinds of “legibility”: the prescription, which should communicate care, is unreadable, while the bill, which demands payment, is perfectly clear. Dunne’s humor targets the power imbalance between expert and layperson, suggesting that professional authority can hide behind jargon and obscurity when it suits the profession, yet becomes transparent when money is involved. Beyond medicine, the epigram generalizes to any system where accountability and explanation are withheld but costs are plainly presented. Its sting comes from the implied inversion of priorities: what matters most to the patient—understanding treatment—is least accessible, while what matters to the provider—compensation—is unmistakable.