FOREIGNERS IN HARLEY ST.

Greymouth Evening Star, 7 May 1936, Page 2

FOREIGNERS IN HARLEY ST.

REFUGEES FROM CONTINENT LONDON, March 14. A complaint that English medical practitioners are suffering from the competition of refugee doctors from the Continent was made to a representative of The Daily Telegraph yesterday by a Harley-street specialist. “This competition is becoming widespread,” he said. “It is very marked in Hampstead and Golden Green. People are dazzled by the apparatus these foreigners use, though the effect may be negligible. “Sometimes a Harley-street address

is obtained, simply for the advertisement it provides. It is becoming common, also, for doctors still in practice abroad to fly over to perform operations or to attend wealthy foreign women who want their children born

in London, so that they may have the protection of British nationality.” The writer of a letter in the “Lancet” urges that British medical societies should investigate applications by foreign students for staff appointments at hospitals. There is an increasing “crop of plates bearing Continental names” in Harley-street, the writer declares.

When this view was put to the medical secretary of the British Medical Association, Dr. G. C. Anderson, he stated that the number of refugees practising in this country could not be more than 150. "We have always felt,” he added, “that the problem was not big enough for us to intervene.”