MEDICAL ADVICE FOR SIXPENCE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1683, 1 June 1904, Page 35 (Supplement)

MEDICAL ADVICE FOR SIXPENCE.

In the bigh-dlass medical circles of the West End of London, as in Harley street, there are doctors who cannot be consulted for five minutes with reference to one of the smallst ailmnts which flesh is ihair o without a fee of two guineas becoming due to them (says the writer of an article entitled “The Sixpenny Doctor at Work'* in “Cassell's Saturday Journal” for March). The sharp contrast is in the East Ena and the other lower parts of the Metropolis, where there is what .s known as the sixpenny doctor, an able medical man who has a universal fee for all patients and all degrees of attendance. It is sometimes sixpence, sometime a shilling; buit there are cases where fourpence only is the recognised remuneration. These doctors are genuine M.D.’s above all suspicion, their skill is unquestioned, and often enough they give quite as much laborious attention to difficult, case among their poor clients for their meagre sixpenny reward as their brother medicos in the West End would do for a hundred guineas, and quite likely, too, with as beneficial esults.

Nor are they so poor as some might chaik. Sixpences make shillings, then pounds, then hundreds, and then thousands —if there aire sufficient of them. That is the simple logic of the medical man who takes a shop in a dirty, roughlooking street, and sets himself up as a sixpenny doctor. It is usually a shop that he engages for his consulting moan, surgery, and dispensary combined, for his poor patients have less hesitation in going there than they would have to a private house. Inside the door there is an arrangement of panelling and apertures like those at a railway booking office, which is designed tO' preserve decorum and order among the uncouth patients when they are waiting, by the score, their turn for attention. • < . A pra-citice like this may be built up b,y the hard work of years, or it may be bought at a big price. Five thousand pounds might be asked for it, and be really cheap for the money. Six hundred patients a day to be seen and advised! Such a record has been achieved by a sixpenny doctor, and that meant £ls a day; while expenses, save tor assistance, are almost down to zero. Rent is a mare trifle. there is no carriage to maintain—alii calls are made on foot or on bicycle—and all fees am “cash down.’"’