“Heavy Burden” Placed On Doctors’ Shoulders

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30529, 26 August 1964, Page 23

“Heavy Burden” Placed On Doctors’ Shoulders

“You are father, mother, and nearly God to a tremendous number of your patients,” the Roman Catholic Bishop of Christchurch (the Most Rev. B. P. Ashby) told Christchurch specialist doctors at a dinner at the Calvary Convent.

“You are dealing with what, for many of your patients, is their dearest possession—their own physical life,” Bishop Ashby said. Physical well-being was of great importance, too, to the minority who drew also on the sources of spiritual comfort in the Church.

“Your patients go to you with everything from a slipped disc to a crumbling marriage; hence the necessity in your profession of firm principles and an awareess of psychological and moral implications,” said Bishop Ashby.

“You stand for God,” he repeated. “It is a heavy burden on frail human shoulders.” To Roman Catholic doctors,, observance of the moral code prescribed by the Church had economic as well as social and personal disadvantages.. “Nowhere do the Church’s ethics strike so close to the bone as for Catholic doctors,” Bishop Ashby said. But these doctors loyally accepted the clear-cut doctrine of the Church as a guide to their consciences, and the agony of decision was taken from them. He thanked God that, under the guidance of Bishop Joyce, the Roman Catholic doctors’ association, the Guild of Saints Luke, Cosmos, and Damien, had recently been formed in the diocese.

The president of the Canterbury division of the British Medical Association (Dr. D. T. Stewart) said that, while there was now “not much quarrel” in the sphere of physical disease as between religion and medicine, psychiatry was still a borderland between the two, and lie was pleased to say there was growing co-operation. The psychiatric day department at Calvary Hospital was filling a great need, and it was a pity the hospital was having difficulty in financing the department. The Health Department would not approve a benefit for a private hospital patient who was not in a hospital bed, but his association disagreed sharply with this attitude and was making every effort to get the ruling changed.