PASSING OF THE “DOCTOR”

Evening Star, Issue 18046, 14 August 1922, Page 3

PASSING OF THE “DOCTOR”

MEDICINE BECOMING TOO “ SCIENTIFIC.” The disappearance of the “doctor, as opposed to the exponent of laboratory methods, is causing as much uneasiness in America as in this country- (writes the medical correspondent of the London ‘ Times ’). The ‘ New York Medical Journal’ devotes considerable space to the subject, and Quotes with enthusiasm a recent speech of ITesident Butler, of Columbia University, one of tho most progressive medical schools in the world. President Butler declared: — “The true aim of the medical school should bo to give instruction in fundamental principles and methods, to _ bring ♦be student into contact with realities, to train him in habits of observation and inference. . . . It would be a sorry day for the public health and for the public satisfaction if the physician of large prac-. Meal experience, wido human sympathy, and keen insight into human nature were to yield his place to the expert with the microscope and tho test tube. The scientific aspects of medicine must not be permitted to override its human aspects.” “Dr Butler,” says the American journal, “ has put into words a feeling which is prevalent. throughout a large portion of the medical profession.” The truth is that an immense abuse of the word “science” has been taking place. Attempting to reduce medicine to terms of chemistry or physics is not scientific at all, because medicine itself is a science, independent and separate. Its methods are not those of the laboratory, though it may and does use the laboratory in the course of the pursuit of its own ends. “ The leaders in medical education,” to Quote further from the same source, “have made the mistake of. trying to combine the laboratory specialist with the general practitioner, and as a consequence,the public has suffered and is suffering from a dearth of doctors*.”