WHAT DOCTORS WILL DO IN UTOPIA.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVII, Issue 218, 12 September 1906, Page 3

WHAT DOCTORS WILL DO IN UTOPIA.

BY H. G. WELLS.

; In that extravagant -world of which. 1 : dream, in which -working people will lire ;in delightful cottages and everyone will j have a chance of being happy—in that impossible world all doctors will be members of one great organisation for the public health, with au or most of their income guaranteed to them; I doubt if there will be any private doctors at all. Heaven forbid I should seem to write a word against doctors as they arc. Daily I marvel at the wonders the general practitioner achieves, having regard to the difficulties of his position. But I cannot hide from myself, and 1 do not intend to hide from anyone else, my, : firm persuasion that the services the general practitioner is able to render ue ■ are not one-tenth so effectual as they; ' might be if. instead of his being a prii vate adventurer, he were a member of a 'sanely organised pubm , machine. Consider what training and equipment are, consider the peculiar difficulties of liis work, and then consider for a mo- ; ment wkat better conditions might be invented, and perhaps you will not think my estimate of one-tenth an excessive understatement in this matter. Xearly the whole of our medical profession and most of our apparatus for I teaching and training doctors subsist on strictly commercial lines by earning fees. This chief source of revenue is eked out by the wanton charity of rich, old women, the conspicuous subscriptions of popularity hunters, and a small but growing contribution (in the salaries of medical officers of health and so forth) from the public funds. But the fact remains that for the great mass o£ ! the medical profession there is no living 'to be got except as a salary for hospital practice or by earning fees in receiving ,or attending upon private eases. So long as a doctor is learning or addins to knowledge he earns nothing, and ! the common unintelligent man does not sec why he should earn anything. So I that a doctor who has no religious passion for poverty ami self-dcvotiou gets through the minimum of training and learning as quickly and cheaply as possible, gets into practice as soon as possible, and does all he can to fill up the rest of his time in passing rapidly from case to casp. Thn busier he keeps, the less his leisure for thought and learning, the richer he grows and the more he is esteemed. His four or five years of hasty, crowded ftudy arc supposed to give him a coinpletp and final knowledge of the treatment of every sort of disease, and ho goes on year after year, often -without co-operation, working mechanically ia I the common incident? of practice, births, ! cases of measles and whooping cough, and so forth, and hlnndering more or less in whatever else turns up. There :irt- no public specialists to whom Jhe can refer the difficulties he constantly j encounters: cmly in the ease of rich ; patients is the specialist available; there j are no properly organised information bureaus for him, and no means whatever of keeping him informed upon progress ! and discovery in mcJical science. He is not required to set apart a, month or so in every two or three years in order •to retain to lectures and hospitals to refresh his knowledge. Indeed, the income ot" ihe avernge general practitioner would not permit of such a thing, and almost the only means of contact between him and current thought, lies in the one or other great medic-al journals to which' ho happens to subscribe. I Xow. just as I have nothing but I pmUe for the average general praeti- ] tinner, so t hax'e nothing but praise and admiration for these stalwart looking , publications. Without them I can irnaj;L;io nothing but. the most terrible intellectual atrophy among our medical men. But tVy are private properties I run for prolit, they have to pay. and j half their bulk of the brilliantly written advertisements of new drugs and apparatus. They give much knowledge, they do much to ventilate perI plfxiug , questions, but a broadly connived a-d properly endowed weekly circular could. I believe, do much more. At any rate, in my Utopia this duty of feeding up the general practitioners will not. bo left to private enterprise. I Behind the lirsL line of my medical army will be a second line of able men constantly digesting new research for its practical needs, correcting, explaining, announcing, and in addition a. force of publio specialists to -whom every difficulty in diagnosis will be at once referred. And there will be a properly organised system of reliefs that will allow the general practitioner, and his right hand, the nurse, to come back to the refreshment of study before his knowledge and mind have got rusty. But then my Utopia is a socialistic system. Under our present system of competitive scramble, under any system thatreduees I medical practice to tnerp fee-hunting, nothing of this sort is possible. Then in my Utopia, for every medical man who was mainly occupied in pracj lice. I would have another who was occupied in or about research. People hear so much about modern research, that they do not- realise how entirely inadequate ii; is in amount and equipment. Our general public still is too stupid to- understand the need and value of sustained investigations in any branch of knowledge, at all. In spite of all the 1e.3- ---! =<->ns of the last century it still fails to j realise how discovery and invention enj rich the community and how paying an ; investment is the public employment oT . clever people to think and experiment j for the benefit of all. It still expects to get a Xewton for £800 a year, and requires him to conduct his researches in the margin of time left over when he ; has got. through his animal eighty or j ninety lectures. It imagines discoveries ! are a sort of inspiration that comes J when professors are running to catch j trains. It seems incapable of imagining how , enormous are the untried possibilities 'of research. Of course if you will only ' pay a handful ox men salaries at wliieTi I (he cook of any large hotel would turn lup his nose, you cannot expect to have I the master minds of rhet world at your ■ service: and savp for a few independent ior devoted men. therefore, it is not reaI sonable to suppose that such a poor litj tic dribble of medical research as is hott I going nn is in the hands of persons of ! much more than average mental equipf ment. How can ii be?