MEDICAL SERVICE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4562, 20 April 1942, Page 2

MEDICAL SERVICE

INDIVIDUALITY OF HUMAN RELATIONS

“I would say that the complexity of illness will become greater in the future. It will require more training of the doctor in the perception of the human body and the human mind. He will have to learn how, by an imaginative insight, to put ‘himself in the position of his patient, to interpret what his feelings mean, and size up and evaluate what the particular symptoms mean in that particular patient. That is where the value of the general practitioner comes in. By his constant training he is able to penetrate what the other person thinks and feels. That, to my mind, is the strongest argument against anything like a State service. A State service would create an army of officials, and once you create a merely official relationship between doctor and patient you will lose that individual touch, that understanding mind that is one of the outstanding features of the best type of medical practice to-day. We require more planning, more ordering, in the matter of objective observations and investigations of disease, and I think the problem before the profession at the present time is how to increase these things and at the same time preserve individualism in human relationships. It can be done, largely by increasing the number of clinics, and by gathering together in institutions the various methods of scientific investigations. But at the same time, with all that planning, I think there must be retained the individualism of human relations.”—Lord Dawson, the distinguished British physician.