There have been many followers of the Good Physician who have never been ordained except by the grace of God, whose consecrated devotion to the needs of sick humanity has been a genuine ministry. Often the Christian physician is the best friend of the family. Certainly he has countless opportunities to serve more than the bodily needs of men; and no man in the community is rendering more sacrificial service. He is ever at the call of human need, day or night. He heeds the call of the poorest as quickly as the wealthiest, and does from 5% to 30% of his work without remuneration. He is one of the most necessary factors in every community; yet for many rural communities the nearest up-to-date physician is many miles away.
In these days of specialists, “general practice” is relatively less attractive. There is some danger also that the fine idealism which has long characterized this splendid profession may yield to the growing commercialism which to-day threatens all professions like a canker. When surgeons operate for dollars instead of for a cure; and physicians make the art of healing strictly business instead of scientific kindness, it will be a sad day for humanity.
The work of the physician is not properly a business; it should be classed as social service of the highest order. In spite of the higher standards of medical schools recently[41] with an emphasis on a general college preparation, fewer college men are going into medicine. The percentage has steadily decreased since 1850, and in the past twelve years there has been a sharp decline. The proportion at Harvard College has declined one-half in thirty years, though meanwhile Harvard Medical School has become a strictly graduate department.
It is evident that luxury-loving collegians are avoiding the medical profession to-day just as they are dodging the ministry. If they have capital of their own, business offers them a larger income and makes little demand upon their sympathies in personal service. Selfish men avoid the costs of life-sharing which a life in close personal associations compels, as is true of teaching, the ministry and the medical profession. But this is no handicap but greater opportunity, for men of real earnestness.
The Special Need of Country Doctors
The profession is seriously overcrowded in the cities, but people in the rural districts are literally dying for trained physicians. Some medical faculties are advising their graduates not to stay in the city but to settle in country villages where they are most needed, and where quite possibly they would find greatest success. “There are many towns in this state,” writes a medical professor, “with only 500 to 1,000 people, where a young physician could do well and where he is needed.”
Although, according to the best data obtainable, most medical graduates settle in cities,—the proportion at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, being as high as 90%,—there is a rapidly increasing demand for them in the suburban and rural sections in the East because of the strong city-to-country movement. The secretary of the Harvard Medical faculty notes this: “With the advent of automobiles and the desire of people to live in the country, serious problems in medicine are frequently presented to the country practitioners.”
The need of educated physicians in country communities is well stated by Dr. Means of the Ohio Medical School: “The condition of medical practice in many of our country communities is deplorable. I can recall any number of places where there are two, three, four and five physicians and not one of them has had any post-graduate work from date of graduation, and none of them known to attend medical societies. Their professional work is on a par, no better, no worse, than that of their ancestors. I always feel that such communities sorely need an up-to-date physician who has been educated along the lines of modern sanitation and general medicine. The demand for a medical education has grown to such proportions in the last ten years that graduates, after having spent so much time and money, do not care to go into country practice. The five years or more that they spend in city environments while completing their medical education almost unfits them for country life. The result is that our cities are filling up with young physicians who can scarcely make a living. These are men of character and proficiency who would give tone to any country community and supply a public want.”
The Unique Rewards of Country Practice
There are, to be sure, certain serious disadvantages under which the country physician labors, such as distance from hospitals and nurses; but these are overbalanced by the manifest need and greater opportunity. The situation is acute. For earnest college men, willing to invest their lives in rural leadership, this constitutes a real call to a life of service which may be God’s own call to them. No one who has ever read Ian Maclaren’s story of Dr. MacLure, “A Doctor of the Old School,” can fail to appreciate the peculiar devotion of country people to their trusted physician “who for nearly half a century had been their help in sickness, and had beaten back death time after time from their door.”