Medicine: British Doctors

Lord Dawson of Penn ended his processional across Canada (TIME, Sept. 1) at Winnipeg last week. Some 400 other British doctors, 900 Canadians and 200 U. S. doctors reached there at the same time. Thereupon President William Harvey Smith of the Canadian Medical Association closed that body’s 61st convention, which this year was unimportant, and opened the notable 98th convention of the British Medical Association. In the course of that organization’s ceremonies he was installed as its president, succeeding Professor Arthur H. Burgess of Manchester, Eng.

Two attentive listeners to President Smith’s inaugural address were President William Gerry Morgan of the American Medical Association and President Thomas Bassett Macaulay of Sun Life Assurance Co. of Canada. (See p. 51.)

Health Insurance. President Smith discoursed on socialized medicine: “The economic organization of medicine has not kept pace with its scientific progress. If corporate medicine could not or would not recognize demands so insistently made for the development of a system under which medical aid would be available for rural districts especially, no protest could be raised if governments took steps to inaugurate a system of medical service of whatever type seemed best. . . . There is need of readjustment of the principle that ‘the laborer is worthy of his hire.’ In my judgment there is only one possible solution—health insurance. This is the only answer to the question how competent medical service could be placed within the reach of all, on a basis satisfactory to the public, the medical and nursing professions and the hospitals.”*

President Macaulay of Sun Co., of course, heartily approved this recommendation. His company, like Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. in the U. S., has been doing all it prudently can to improve health conditions in Canada. Last week the B. M. A. elected him an honorary member, together with His Grace Archbishop Samuel Pritchard Matheson, Church of England Primate of All Canada, who as Chancellor of the University of Manitoba last week presented honorary doctor of law degrees to eleven eminent British medical men attending the convention.

Dicta. British practitioners! are bolder and more didactic than U. S. doctors in making statements which are not bookishly scientific. Probable reasons: Ambitious U. S. men fear the envy and censure of colleagues; in England the doctor has a secure social position. At any rate bold and didactic was many a dictum uttered at Winnipeg last week.

Sir E. Farquhar Buzzard, neurologist to King George, successor to the late Sir William Osier as Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford: “We should be well advised not to make a fetish of games as the only means of securing relaxation from work. … As long as [people who watch athletic games] are interested and spend their time in the open air, conditions for relaxation and recreation are adequately fulfilled. . . . You may get as much benefit by watching a game of golf, if you are interested in watching it, as by playing it, or by reading a book for that matter if you are more interested in books than in golf.”

Dr. Robert Hutchison of London, chairman of the B. M. A. section on diseases of children: “To take no thought about what you shall eat or drink is wiser than to be always fussing over it. Likes and dislikes, however, should be listened to; they are nature’s indications of what probably agrees and disagrees. Remember that fruit, though a pleasant addition to the diet, is not very nourishing and that milk is both bulky and bilious. Vegetarianism is harmless enough, although it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness; but it is not a mode of diet for all. It is specially unsuitable for growing children and for sedentary workers.

Lord Dawson: “If a man comes home after a hard day’s work, cold and tired, and sits down and eats a good square meal, he is going to have trouble. He should toast his feet before the fire before eating and warm his hands in a basin of water.”

Canadian & U. S. Medicine. The Canadian Medical convention, although it was relatively insignificant illuminated a little known comparison between Canadian and U. S. medicine: professionally Canadian doctors are better off than U. S. doctors. For every 39 Canadian practitioners there are two hospitals, whereas 45 U. S. men have only two hospitals at their disposal. Canadian men have an average of 1,000 patients each, U. S. men 804. From the patients’ side the advantages are of course reversed.*

Dawsonia. Like Calvin Coolidge, like the Prince of Wales, Lord Dawson of Penn last week became an Indian Chief.f Punctilious was the investment. The Canadian Government had permitted 75 well-behaved and clean Plain Cree Indians, their families, ponies, tepees and festive clothes to leave their reservation for a parade encampment outside Winnipeg. Thither proceeded physician, priest, politician, and spouse. The Plain Cree formed a ring. Into it stepped Lord Dawson in sack suit and soft hat. He doffed the hat. An Indian settled a vast feather headdress on his head, a red blanket embroidered with beads and ermine about his shoulders; put a beaded pipe and pouch in his hands. Up stepped long-lipped Chief Red Dog, with Joe Ironquil, his interpreter.

Chief Red Dog (balanced on his heels): I have heard of one great man who went to the bedside of the Big Chief of the Empire far away across the sea and pulled the Big Chief through. . . . The Cree tribe wants to make the great man a chief, and call him Big-Medicine-Man-to -the -Big -Chief (Kitche -Okemow -0 -Maskikie-Okemow). Chief Big-Medicine-Man-to-the-Big-Chief Dawson (on his toes): The great white father of us all is today healthy and happy.

(Extended silence).

Lord Dawson: What do you want me to do now?

(Laughter.)

A voice: You can take those things off now.

Promptly Lord Dawson did so, clapped on his proper hat. Thereupon he proceeded ceremoniously to Chief Red Dog’s wigwam for a stately visit. Other Indians, in gay colored shirts, jumped on their ponies, raced around under surveillance of Royal Canadian Mounted Police, themselves in brilliant crimson-gold-&-blue uniforms.

As an indigenous finish to the ceremonial afternoon. Prime Minister Bennett proceeded to a large buffalo head lying nose up on the Manitoba prairie, presented it to the B. M. A. for the common room of its House in London.*

* President Morgan and the A. M. A. disapprove of any socialization of medicine (TIME, Aug. 11). Say they: [we are] not so much concerned about the future of the busy practitioner as in the . . . progressively deleterious effect upon the stability of the self-dependence of the less fortunate of the public. [We] look with a good deal of trepidation upon the gradual insidious increase of paternalistic tendencies.”

†in Great Britain a surgeon does not call himself a “doctor.” But a gynecologist does, because long ago gynecologists did not practice surgery, were purely M. D.’s.

* Basis for these figures:

Canada U.S.

Population 9,796,800 122,698,180

Doctors 9,862 152,503

Hospitals 506 6,792

An old medical joke: A man convalescing from a severe nose operation cried out to his nurse that he had to sneeze. “Go right ahead,” said she, ”that shows you are getting better. It will be a great feather in my cap. “Very well,” said the patient. “You just stand out of the way and I’ll make—Kerchooo!—an Indian Chief out of you!”

*For B. M. A. House’s Great Hall Winnipeg gave a crimson silk flag, 54×41 in. fringed in red, white and blue, bearing the city’s arms.

†The only one west of Chicago.