NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20171, 4 February 1929, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE

"It must be champagne. In fact, champagne ar.d ' a good time' have, for a very large number of us, come to mean almost the same thing." writes Mr. Hamilton Fyfe in tho Daily Chronicle. " One need not be a teetotaller to regret this false idea. There must be ' something rotten in the state* of those whose aspirations for ' a good time arc limited to the sort of lifo which that picture displays. What folly, when there is such a world about us, so full of wonder delight and fun, to fix the height of enjoyment at sitting in an over-heated, overupholstered conservatory, at rating and drinking more than enough (for that's what it comes to), at wearing clothes designed to express a claim to superiority over the common herd! What a folly! What a waste! At a moment in our national life. too. when we should all be struggling against the forces of decay, to make luxury, softness, self-indulgence our aim is pitiful. As for the desire to live that sort of life when millions among us arc without what we consider bare necessaries of existence, that deserves a harsher epitheL A good time, indeed! A selfish, mean time, say I." THE GENERAL HOSPITAL. Arguments in favour of provision for paying patients in general hospitals wero presented by Mr. R, G. Hogarth, senior surgeon to the Nottingham General Hosupital in an address under the auspices of tho General Federation of Trades Unions in London. It was an anachronism. to regard the general hospital as solely a charitable refuge for the destitute and a house of compassion for tho sick; rather was it to bo considered as a centre of medical science and activity, in which were concentrated the best medical, surgical, and uursing skill, and the best equipment. The houses of the working classes were unsuitable for the treatment of serious illness, but so wero tho houses of tho middlo classes, and even of the rich. That was why tho nursing home had developed; but this was an expensive institution, wlrcli even at its best was inferior from a medical point of view to a hospital—for example, hardly any nursing home had a resident medical officer. The nursing home, indispcnsnblo as it was, was a makeshift, and would disappear as tho various classes using it came to be treated in the " paying" part of a hospital; or perhaps a larger and superior nursing homo would arise, with practically th* 1 staff and equipment of a hospital. He was in favour of development along the lines of th® paying bed or ward or annexo of the big general hospital. Institutional treatment in a hospital, with its staff and equipment, was tho best possible treatment for all grave illness, and tho mail stream of development should flow in that, direction. Mr. Hogarth quoted a passage from Utopia, written four centuries ago: "Though no man is sent thither (to the hospitals of the ideal city) against his will, there is no sick person in all the city that had not rather lie in hospital than in his own house"— * a remarkable prophecy when one recalled tint the hospital of Sir Thomas Moro's day was little moro than a lazaret.