TOPICS OF THE TIMES

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 4514, 3 July 1937, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE TIMES

Policing and WarfaTe. "Why we are quite rightly suspicious of it ever being our duty as Christians to use physical force, is that physical force is a natural accompaniment of anger and greed and evil passions," says Dr. A. D. Lindsay, master of Balliol College, Oxford. "That is true of almost all use of physical force against our fellow men, and, of course, especially true of its greatest and most terrible example, war. Because that is so, I do not myself think we can say quite simply, as people do, If you approve of the action of the police to maintain law, you must approve of war when used for the same purpose. I don't think that applies even to the maintenance of law at home. We think there has to be a lot of justification before the troops are called out to maintain order at home. It remains true that it is our duty to maintain just rules; but we are to use every effort and spare ourselves* no pains to see that these are kept with love.' The use of force against each other is always a sign of failure or misunderstandings; but when we have failed, to refuse to use force might be. a sign of even greater failure." Doctor and Patient. "There is a curiously illogical outlook which almost everyone adopts in fact, if not in theory, with respect to medical practices. The doctor lives by sickness, not by health. The more people who are ill, the more the doctor earns, and most people take this state of affairs for granted. This is not to suggest that the private prac-

titioners are not for the most part wholly upright, ethical and competent; but there ought to be more doctors who are paid to keep us healthy and then we should need fewer to try to put us right when we have fallen ill. The average patient expects too much. Too often he wants to be cured in ten minutes, with a bottle of physic, of all the accumulated ills of forty years of offence against the principles of healthy living. It is not the fault of the doctor that he lives on another people's troubles. Ignorance or elementary biology is largely to blame. Everyone should be taught to learn to go to the doctor to find out how to keep well,and not to wait until sickness has struck him down. Unfortunately, it is improbable that many people will be pursaded that it is to their advantage to pay a fee to a doctor when they are feeling perfectly well. This is a kind of thrift which will hardly appeal to the masses."—Dr. Wyndham E. B. Loyd. M.A., M.R.C.S., D.H.P., in "A Hundred Years of Medicine."