DOCTORS' PROBLEM

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19338, 31 May 1937, Page 13

DOCTORS' PROBLEM

• INCURABLE CASES PROFESSOR'S VIEW SYDNEY, May 8. ' Professor J. Meakins, Professor of Medicine at the MoGill "University, Montreal, in an address to 200 students at the Sydney University yesterday, said that the doctor was often placed on the horns of a dilemma. He had to consider whether to tell a patient who had a serious and incurable disease, or whether to lock it up in his own heart. It was very hard to decide, and much depended upon the actual case. Personally, he believed that the latter was the better course to take. Tliev should consider a patient as a man. * "The individual goes through life performing certain functions from which he more or less derives enjoyment. Ihe intelligent individual as a rule knows what he is here for, or at least flunks lie does. But, through the whole, of a person's life, there runs the thread of good health. It is to preserve this thread in the human machine that you make yourselves doctors.' Preventive medicine was becoming more and more important. This is due to the parasitic and microbic cause ot disease, a conception winch had put medicine as a science about 300 years ahead. The full fruition of tins discovery had by no means been reached * Professor Meakins referred to methods of handling patients. "The human being, it he had no mind, would be a very good experimental animal." He said: ? 'lf he had no mind, because the patient often tried to give you of his own accord an answer, ami it was often very easy to get any answer they liked it they put the questions in the proper way.