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FOREWORD
Letter from Dr Norman Haire
My dear Ludovici,
It has been a great pleasure for me to read Lysistrata—it is so stimulating. Whether one agrees with your views or not (and I disagree with many of them), the book impels one to re-examine one’s standards of value, and that is the highest function a book can perform.
Perhaps I am prejudiced, but to me you seem very hard on the medical profession. With the present idiotic system of paying the doctor better for illness than for health the wonder is, not that we doctors have so many faults, but that we have so few. In a saner age we shall get a retaining fee for keeping each person or group of persons well, and so, in order to avoid excessive work, if for no higher motive, we shall aim at preventing disease rather than at alleviating it. To a large extent we do that now, in spite of the fact that it takes money out of our pockets.
Your exhortation to breast-feed babies is backed by all but a few cranks, and I find your suggestion to make confinement easier by proper diet during pregnancy very interesting. I remember that at the obstetric hospital at which I was trained we used to notice that patients who had been on special treatment for albuminuria had, in general, easy confinements. It is very significant, from the standpoint of your suggestions, that in the diet of these patients the protein element had been very greatly reduced. I shall follow up your idea and let you know the result.