The Timaru Herald. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1901.

Timaru Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 11577, 12 October 1901, Page 2

The Timaru Herald. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1901.

We publish this morning a letter from Mr J. Talbot, chairman of the Hospital and Charitable Aid Board, in reply to our leading article of Thursday last. We are very glad that Mr Talbot has written to us, because his remarks and statements are to a large extent confirmatory,of the views which we expressed. We may say at once that our sole reason for suggesting that the Board are indifferent to public opinion was that their actions seemed to point in that direction. Of course we are referring'only to the disagreements with the late honorary medical staff. Mr- Talbot assures us that.the Board are not indifferent to public opinion. "It is," he says, " always gratifying to have the' feelmg that one has the support and goodwill of the public in the performance of duties on public bodies." So far good; and the question is whether in this matter the Board have the support and goodwill of the public. We may be mistaken, but we do not think they have. • Over and over again, and by all sorts and conditions of men, we have heard regret expressed that, owing to the attitude of the Board, the patients .in the hospital are deprived of the services of the excellent body of medical practitioners resident in Timaru. That deprivation is a serious matter, because at any moment there may be brought into the hospital a surgical or medical case in regard to which it may be of the utmost importance to the patient to have the benefit of the ripened skill and experience of the local practitioners who are now excluded virtually by the action of. the Hospital and Charitable Aid Board. It would be shear nonsense to assert that the absence of those practitioners is no loss to the institution. Mr I Talbot admits that he is not satisfied with the present position, and he believes that his fellow-members are not satisfied. What does that mean? Is if not an admission that the services of the outsids practitioners were valuable ? If they were not valuable—if the present arrangement is the best in the interests of the patients, which is the main thing to be considered—there is nothing more to be said, except that the almost universal system of having an 1 honorary hospital staff must be useless and cumbersome, and British hospital authorities all over the world are pursuing a. wrong course. But that is not the position taken up by Mr Talbot. ' He admits the value of an honorary staff, but asserts that it is the fault of the local medical men that the system is not in force in Timaru. That is where we join issue with him, and now we can show from his own letter that he is in the wror.g. He says : " Let me state what the Board requires, and I can hardly believe the demands will be unreasonable; namely, that a duly qualified medical man shall be in charge of the hospital and have the sole charge of it, and that the medical men of the town will, in consideration of certain privileges and advantages which the institution gives them, provide an honorary visiting and assisting staff." In those few words Mr Talbot gives himself completely away. He shows that he does not understand the matter and is ignorant of what is due to the medical profession. He is perfectly satisfied with the " impossible situation," which we alleged in our article that the Hospital and Charitable Aid Board had created for the medical men in Timaru. He can see nothing anomalous in a staff of experienced medical men being "mere assistants of a junior member of the profession." He thinks it quite right and proper and in accordance with the etiquette, and, let us add, the decencies of the profession, " that they should hold the candle and hand the junior what is [ necessary" but that lie should be the master and the principal. As those are Mr Talbot's ideas it is useless to argue the matter further with him; but he has said quite enough to show that the medical practitioners of Timaru had good ground for complaint, and that the fault did not rest with them but with the Board. Before concluding let us refer to what Mr Talbot says about " certain privileges and advantages" which the institution gave the honorary medical staff. We should like to know what those privileges and advantages are. He cannot refer to the honorarium, which was paid to the medical men during the later stage of their connection with the hospital, for that was an arrangement intended merely to give them a kind of definite footing on the staff, and they never wanted payment, and if things had gone on amicably and comfortably as they do elsewhere, such an arrangement would not have been mentioned. The alleged privileges and ad-

vantages refer to something else, and a former utterance of Mr Talbot's, lets us know what that something else is. At a meeting of the Board held some time ago, he said in effect that if the medical men gave their services they got a " quid pro quo," for their hospital practice served to keep their hands in. Truly a very tactful and tasteful remark,' which ignored altogether the generous and self-sacrificing services of the medical men, and attributed to them a purely selfish not to say sordid motive. What can the profession have done to Mr Talbot to. get him so hotly against them? Have they tried to scalp him, or deprive him unnecessarily of his fair share of arms and legs?