FOOTNOTES:
[5] An Address at the Forty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association, New Orleans, October 27, 1919.
[6] The importance of this is seen in the fact that there are in England and Wales 14,614 parishes, and only 646 unions for the relief of the poor.
[7] Rumsey: Essays in State Medicine, 1856, pp. 190, 277, 282.
[8] Goodnow: Municipal Problems, p. 226.
CHAPTER III
The Increasing Socialization of Medicine[9]
Medicine has always been the most altruistic of learned professions; and can proudly claim that its practitioners have ever been ready to give gratuitous assistance to all in need of it. Even more than when Burton wrote his Anatomy of Melancholy—for then medicine was an art with but limited foundation in science—physicians can be defined as “God’s intermediate ministers”; and can rightly assume the proud position which Burton gives them:
Next, therefore, to God, in all our extremities (for of the Most High cometh healing, Eccles. XXXVIII, 2) we must seek to, and rely upon, the Physician, who is the Manus Dei (the Hand of God), said Hierophilus, and to whom He hath given knowledge, that he might be glorified in his wondrous works.
Each medical practitioner in his own circle, and to the extent of his medical competence, is a medical officer of health, having more influence in directing and controlling the habits, occupation, the housing, the social customs, the dietary and general mode of life of the families to which he has access, than any other person. It must be added that in most instances he has even more influence than the minister of religion in regulating the ethical conduct of his patients, especially as regards alcoholism and sexual vices. In the United States the federal government has relieved the medical profession from their duty of restricting individual alcoholic consumption, and an experiment has been begun which if continued—and I trust nothing will prevent this—must forthwith reduce the income of practising physicians throughout the American continent, and at the same time do more to diminish crime, accidents and sickness and to increase national efficiency than any other single step that could be taken, with one exception. This would consist in the universal raising of the standard of sexual conduct of men to that which they expect from their future wives, thus securing a rapid reduction and early disappearance of gonorrhoea and syphilis, diseases which rank with pneumonia, tuberculosis and cancer as chief among the captains of death and disablement in our midst.
The growing possibilities of improvement in personal and social welfare depend very largely on the extent to which, as I have put it elsewhere, “each practitioner becomes a medical officer of health in the range of his own practice.” Even on their present record, if—at least on one side—the Kingdom of God consists in “the union of all who love in the service of all who suffer,” medical men can proudly and yet humbly take their place as essential agents in the daily fulfilment of the daily prayer, “Thy Kingdom come.”