Professor Caughey On Doctors’ Moral Status

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30234, 12 September 1963, Page 7

Professor Caughey On Doctors’ Moral Status

“The guiding principles in a modern university seem to produce in men a driving ambition and an aggressive competiveness which make for lack of charity and care for others. As a result there is ■danger we are training doctors who are aggressive, successful, and highly acquisitive but who lack a proper concern for patients,” says Professor J. E. Caughey in the “New Zealand Medical Journal.” “There is evidence of declining personal standards in the expressions of the emotional life of our universities and elsewhere as seen in student and other medical publications. These and other straws . in the wind support the suggestion of a decline in our moral status. “If we as medical men and women are indisciplined we are no longer able to answer the problems of our patients. Doctors occupy a place of privilege and are expected to be leaders in the community.

“There are some doctors who believe a man’s private life is his own affair, but recent happenings in Westminster, which have held Britain up to ignominy, have made it abundantly clear that personal and individual morality has everything to do with public leadership. “To disregard this is to fly in the face of history. None of us has the right to cast the first stone, but we can all resolve to be different. “Character is still the key to a sound medical profession. Money cannot buy it. It is not ours by right. It is our job to create it.’’