PREVENTIVE MEDICINE.

Evening Star, Issue 19617, 25 July 1927, Page 6

PREVENTIVE MEDICINE.

Sir Robert Philip presented a prospect of the future which repetition is fast making familiar when, in his presidential address to a meeting of the British Medical Association at Edinburgh last week, ho dwelt on the possibilities of preventive medicine. “ 1 foresee the time,” he said, “when the bottled preparations of to-day will figure ,s crude relies of the dark ages in antiquarian museums. . . . Medicine has ceased

to bo merely a healing art, and the doctor must more and more regard himself as a preventive agent.” Those statements would have been startling if they had been spoken only a few years ago, but the medical man who enunci-

ates them to-day can do so with the support of tho best minds of his profession. The same scorn of the 'pharmacopoeia on which tho hopes of doctors were formerly fixed was expressed by Professor F. E. Wynne in words almost identical a few weeks ago when, in a lecture to the People’s League of Health given in the rooms of the Medical Society of London, lie declared; “'The 1 bottle of medicine ’ habit is nothing but a persistence of a depraved superstition or a, form of medieval fetish worship.” Professor Wynne went on to assert that tho thousands of pounds spent every year on drugs uni lithe National Health Insurmee Act at Homo were a pure waste of money. If that expenditure was to cease, instead of there being a deterioration in public health, ho was certain the’e would bo a big improvement. Sir Robert Philip believes 'that the final triumph of medicine will consist not *li the exclusion of disease, bub in tnc restoration of man to a perfect fo-.m and natural function. Tho man’s duty will be to keep himself fit with the aid of his physician, and there will then bo less need for tho curing of diseases which, with more attention to the laws of Nature, will not be incurred. What delays tho realisation of such a happy prospect, according to Professor Wynne, is the foolishness of the average man, whose concern for illness is seldom shown until it has him in its grip, and may quite jsffcssibly be beyond the resources of his physician to cure. Every doctor, he declared, who went through a long and expensive training expected to bo able to earn a living at the end of it. He might long to be a teacher of his patients, but if lie yielded to that longing ho must make up his mind to retire into tho wilderness of poverty. The public put great faith in the “bottle of medicine” enro for practically every disease. But the average man is beginning to learn, according to another high authority, Lord Dawson of Penn. In an address which he gave last month to medical men Lord Dawson pointed out that in these, days the scope and function and the calling of medicine were wider and had a broader basis than in years gone by. when they were mainly concerned with developed disease in individuals. They were now increasingly devoting their attention to what he might call the threshold symptoms, to that stage of dislocated function which preceded the disease; and as a result of that in their work they were brought more and more in contact with people sufficiently well to he active. The day may come which Sir Robert Philip envisages, when people will consult their doctor long before they feel any symptom of illness, and the doctor will be paid for keeping them well. The next step to that, no doubt, will be that people who neglect to take care of themselves and fall into illness will be punished, after the manner of ‘ Erewhon,’ as a menace to the community, just as criminals are punished now. But a great advance must bo made by medical science, and also by onr social laws, which permit many influences to exist still that arc far from conducive to public health, before that day can come. The ordinary medical practitioner has so much to do in curing, or in endeavoring to cure, disease that his thoughts are not easily given to preventing it. That makes the need for such a special study of preventive medicine as is given to it now by experts at the Otago Medical School, for example, and would ho given to it in far greater measure if more furfds were available for the purpose.