Doctor’s Wife Important

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31987, 14 May 1969, Page 3

Doctor’s Wife Important

A doctor’s wife is far more important than his car, but often receives less regular and less informed attention, says an article in a recent issue of the “New Zealand Medical Journal.”

The wife of a doctor receives no training for her

role, yet it is she who largely determines her husband’s success or failure, the article says. Her influence has a major effect on the quality of the eare he gives his patients.

If her husband is busily trying to find himself as a doctor, so the doctor’s wife, under similar urgent pressures, is trying to learn her role. At the same time, she will be learning how to mother young children, be an ancillary nurse in the practice, and even a substitute medical adviser in her husband’s absence. A doctor’s wife must also be financial manager, a caterer to an erratic timetable, and has to fill a defined social and intellectual position in the community, the article says.

The challenge she faces is so formidable that the best the young doctor can do is choose someone for his wife in whom all these developments have been accomplished substantially, at least in potential form, when he meets her.

He can give her, also, enough of his own time and attention, because no one else can be nearly as helpful as he can.

y A few doctors put their i- families first, a far larger proe portion put their patients first, a while the majority struggle f all their lives to maintain a fair balance.

Whatever way is taken, someone or something is sacri-

ficed, and the doctor has to tolerate the tensions in himself, says the article. There is an implication conveyed by a great deal of medical teaching that the patients must come first. In the long run, this is wrong teaching. If a young doctor neglects his own emotional needs and those of his family, he will not be such a good doctor eventually, and his patients in the long run will also suffer.

Twins Make Progress.— Hayley and Lisa Willis, the twin baby girls who weighed only 21b 3oz and 11b 7oz respectively when born in the National Women’s Hospital on April 15, are making progress in their incubators. Their mother, Mrs Helen Willis, says that Hayley now weighs 21b 6oz, and that Lisa has gained Boz to reach lib 15oz.—Auckland, May 13.