SOCIAL PROGRESS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 25, 30 January 1943, Page 8

SOCIAL PROGRESS

WARTIME GAINS IN MEDICINE

Sir Wilson Jameson, Chief Medical Officer of the Ministry of Health, delivered the annual Harveian Oration at the Royal College of Physicians. Harvey's life and times, he said, were inseparable from great events and various forms of national life and struggle. Such times had often been followed by periods of great social change. It might be that some extensive programme of social reform, of which social medicine would be an integral part, would be introduced as an immediate post-war measure. For war, though a great destroyer of things worth preserving, might yet almost overnight open the door to progress and reform that in other times would have cost years of constant striving. Some far-reaching measures had been adopted to meet the medical needs of the state of emergency. There had been > developed throughout the country an emergency hospital scheme which could, and did, accept responsibilities that neither the profession nor the hospitals in their former condition as a series of isolated units could ever have undertaken. From being a service originally designed to secure the treatment of service sick and of battle and air-raid casualties, the scheme had come to care for the medical needs of large groups of the civilian population. One important result had; been the virtual disappearance of many waiting lists at hospitals. ' He hoped the combination of bench work and field work, under the scheme for an emergency public health laboratory service, would become a permanent part of our armamentarium against infectious disease. In this work they had been helped in the most generous and skilful fashion by the American Red Cross—Harvard Field Hospital Unit. This unit represented by no means the only medical wartime debt they owed to their professional colleagues in North America. The hospital pathological services had been similarly extended, and, he hoped, a closer association between clinicians and pathologists thereby established. Immunisation against diphtheria had become part of the Government public health programme, new methods of attack on tuberculosis were being introduced, and a real nutritional policy had been formulated which included collaboration between the Ministries of Health, Food, and Agriculture. A programme of public education and a system of checking results by means of local surveys and a national plan for the collection of hospital morbidity statistics had been established. Surely these gains in time of war would not be lost in time of peace. He paid a tribute to the forward policy of the University of Oxford in establishing a Chair of Social Medicine, and to the wisdom the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust had shown by its generous support of the university in this venture. Another sign of great significance had been the formation by the British Medical Association of its Planning Commission and, still more, the character of its interim report. They might read into this report a realisation on the part of the medical profession that their continued existence as a-series of isolated units was in the interests neither of themselves nor. of the public; that if private practitioners were to take their proper place in the conduct of public medical services the medical profession would have to submit to some agreed measure of reorganisation, and that the better "utilisation of medicine by the State" must form an essential element of any post-war policy of social reconstruction. The Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians must inevitably play a large part in moulding the pattern of post-war social reforms. ,