MINISTRY OF HAPPINESS, SUGGESTS LORD HORDER

Northern Advocate, 1 December 1936, Page 12

MINISTRY OF HAPPINESS, SUGGESTS LORD HORDER

Lord Horder, in his presidential address to the Royal Medical Society at Edinburgh, said he wanted to emphasise the view that doctors could make useful contributions towards happiness, and so indirectly towards health. There was a considerable overlap between these two things. A healthy nation tended to be happy, and a happy nation tended to be healthy. He was not sure that they could do much, more than they had already done along some of the more hackneyed lines of preventive medicine. Sanitation was under control. Occupational diseases had lessened in a large degree. In the matter of clean food, Vested interests seemed to delay certain rather obvious precautions from being enforced. But a few more typhoid and streptococcal epidemics might stir the public to insistence in this direction. Preventive medicine had certainly made good in the main. We lived longer, and more healthily, than we ever did. But that was not all. The Greatest Problem. When he arrived in New York a few months ago, Khe pressmen crowded into his cabin, and the first question put was, “Tell us, Doctor, has medicine done anything recently” (meaning the past few days) “to prolong life?” He replied, “Surely we live loqg enough: isn’t the problem how to live more happily?” If this really'was the problem nowadays, as he believed it was, then there was a series of ways in which the doctor could help by his special knowledge and by his personal influence.

There was the Ministry of Health and the Department of Health. Surely there could be a Ministry and a Department of Public Happiness. With such an ideal Ministry of Happiness, would not perhaps the political hyperpyrexia of recent days in the East End of London,’ and some states of political and social stress in other places, be its concern rather than the concern of the Home Office? There was too much canned food for the mind, leading to beri-beri of the soul. Critical Times.

However, whether it be through Ministries and Departments of Health, or by other corporate means, the medical profession must take its share of the work. The times were critical. They were made so ■'by the of imminent risk of a conflagration which a few cool heads were doing tlieir utmost to avert. , If they failed to keep their poise as a nation they might help to precipitate the pandemonium. Such failure would be largely because they had too long neglected the simple factor of public happiness through the avenue of public health. For the doctor there could be no Left or Right. For him there was expert knowledge, a rooted adherence to truth and horse-sense. That British mixture was their equipment in what was perhaps the most lethal fight they had ever, as individuals and as a body, had to face: the fight for stability of mind and body in the interest not only of national existence but of the existence of civilisation.

The position facing us, Lord Horder continued, is appallingly, transparently, unpalatably simple. Let me state the desiderata in terms that are clear, however crude:— What is Wanted.

(1) Enough of the right food in. the belly. But it is no good telling people to “drink more milk” if they can’t get it. At present milk costs 2d a gallon for making walking-stick handles, and lOd a gallon for human food. The problem of distribution must be tackled.

(2) Easy access to the fresh air,

(3) Shelter, but shelter at a rent which leaves something to buy food with, the proprietary jerry -builder notwithstanding. Granted that decent houses are indispensable to health and to happiness, they do not of themselves create happiness, or even health. Of what use is it that the doctrinaire reformer should plan and build large blocks of fiats, equipped with the latest gadgets, if the doctor finds that the higher rents have resulted in malnutrition from food parsimony, and in depression through the unfriendliness and lack of social intercourse in the barrack type of living? (4) There must be leisure for play, and that may lead to thinking, even “high thinking.” (5) Noise control.

(6) Finally, to complete these reasonable demands that our patients, the public, make of us, may I not include the giving of each human being a chance before he is born, and after death the decent disposal of his body in the best interest of his fellow men.

Ideal Of Freedom

Lord Horder said that the answer to the question why they should try to secure physical fitness and happiness for the people was: In order that they should preserve their mental poise, when large sections of humanity were losing it. This mental poise, if only they could keep it, might yet save civilisation. But if they developed a national hysteria, or a -national hypochondriasis, this unique opportunity would be lost, and lost for ever. They were told that other nations had idealsf and that the pursuit of these stimulated them to fitness and to efficiency. “But we British have an ideal, too, an ideal that is more dearly cherished by the universal heart of mankind, and therefore has more permanence than any which is determined by a merely temporary objective. The deep and fundamental note in our ideal is freedom. Would that a ‘voice oracular’ might peal to-day and waken us to the realisation that to maintain this ideal it behoves us to be fit and happy.”