[12] I. e., any doctor in a given area who is willing to treat patients under the conditions of the Insurance Act.
CHAPTER V
Some Problems of Preventive Medicine of the Immediate Future[13]
The Great War has changed our outlook on social, including medical, problems; and has made all of us consider anxiously in the midst of the terrible wreckage from war, what useful lessons may be garnered for our future guidance. In speaking of losses, I am not referring to financial burdens, though these are fabulously high—the bare statement that the British national debt has increased from 645 to near 8,000 millions sterling, brings this home—and we shall, most of us, go relatively poor for the rest of our lives and our children likewise. Nothing but the most effective and scientific use of our energies on the part of workers of every class can save us from protracted poverty.
I am thinking rather, however, of the losses of life and limb, of hearing and eyesight, and of reason, which have been experienced—one or other—in nearly every other family in the British Empire, and which show once more the wantonness of war: how cheaply life is held by it, how careless it is of the individual; and how disregardful it is of human promise and performance.
The destruction of over 700,000 lives of sharers in our common Empire, killed in battle or dead from wounds, represents an imperial loss, a terrible destruction of the real capital of the Empire—its manhood—and of the flower of that manhood; and generations will come and go before the Empire recovers completely.
Gains from War
But we can set out some great gains from war.
1. Not the least of these is the fact that the fears entertained by the more pessimistic that we had become enervated and decadent have been falsified on many a stricken field; and not less in the strenuous work of those who have worked remote from the battlefield. Our men and many women also have shown themselves willing to give their lives for great impersonal ends. Their lives have been sacrificed—for our children, for liberty, for peace, for security against military barbarism, and for high ideals of life. The emergence of such a high proportion of our total population from selfishness and self-centred life to a sacrificial position, raises hope that rightly directed appeal to the collective self of the community during peace time for aid against the horrors of peace—especially those caused by disease—will also succeed in enlisting the assistance of the majority of the population and thus removing the vast mass of removable disease and disablement which now prevails.
2. The war has knitted together in active comradeship the Old Country and its younger and more energetic children in the Dominion of Canada and in other parts of the British Empire, in bonds of mutual indebtedness and gratitude and in admiration of great deeds, in a manner and to an extent which must forever preclude misunderstanding or separation.
In these two respects especially—and in others which I shall dwell on more fully—we can, as Wordsworth put it, when commenting on the wars of the French Revolutionary period: