15 JANUARY 1960, Page 4

BMA Ban

Art organisationwhich needs to indulge in a .spell of intensive self-criticism is the British Medical Association. A few weeks ago the BMA Council was attacked by Tire Times for its decision to ban a family planning advertisement from one of the booklets published in association with the Family Doctor; this, The Times com- plained, was a deplorable weak-kneed concession to the opinions of a minority pressure group— Roman Catholic doctors, reputedly about one- sixth of the profession. The British Medical Journal has since been trying to justify this. The Tinier. it recalls, has itself been at fault in the past; notably during the war when a Central Council for Health Education advertisement about intes- tinal infections was refused. In any case—the BMJ, continues—the advertisement was not banned by the Council: it was withdrawn by the chairman of the Family Doctor Committee before a vote was taken. And the decision was for a different reason : 'We can -state unequivocally,' a leading article in the BMJ asserts, 'that the BMA Council did not succumb to the pressure of a Roman Catholic minority. But there are obviously grave doubts about the wisdom of publishing in a popular health magazine issued by the BMA to the public—and read, among others, by teenagers and by the immature—an advertisement which might be held to give the green light to contra- ceptive practices.'

These are specious arguments. The Times was indeed foolish to reject the advertisement, but the cases are not parallel : it was not the fear of a pressure group that troubled The Times, but the knowledge that the great mass of its readership would have been shocked (which was, of course, the purpose of the advertisement). And clearly the

family planning advertisement was withdrawn at

the last moment to let the BMA Council out of an embarrassing situation. But the really deplor-

able argument is that the publication might fall into the hands of 'teenagers or the immature'-- a regression to the principle of the former obscenity law which certain public-spirited citizens have recently managed to get rid of.

If the BMA Council had been sincere on this issue, we could condemn it for being misguided and leave the issue at that. But its defence is ID

fact hypocritical. The Family Doctor and its associated publications are a commercial under- taking; and this sometimes leads them, as we have noted before in the Spectator, to throw medi- cal considerations overboard.

Last summer, for example, they sponsored a pamphlet Know and Enjoy your daily bread.

This made hardly any attempt at an assessment of the merits and demerits of bread as an article of diet, or to distinguish between various types of bread—which would have been a useful public service—but (as Leslie Adrian pointed out at the time) was 'a quite uncritical puff of the products of the big mechanical bakeries . . . containing articles signed by writers with medical degrees but in the prose style of the copy-writer : "There is no finer food you can buy. And it is cheap.

What more do you want?" ' The pamphlet was, in fact, the work of a public-relations firm which serves a group of big bakeries. They were perfectly entitled to get their products this •excellent puff; but it was disgraceful that the British Medical

Association should have lent its authority to it—

as we must presume it did : for it made no attempt to answer the charge when we made it. This is only one of many points which the BMA would be wise to examine. Another, even more important, concerns medical anonymity. By en- forcing it (with the limp compliance of the General Medical Council) the BMA is simply

bringing medical journalism into disrepute—

because any hack can churn out a few paragraphs and sign himself 'Harley Street MD,' or some such pseudonym. The rule against doctors getting their names before the public, too, breaks down precisely at the point where it would be most useful : doctors with fashionable practices and famous patientS, particularly royal patients, have small difficulty keeping their names in the news- papers : whereas a doctor who has a genuine gift for teaching—a David Stafford-Clark, say—is not even allowed to put his name on his serious TV programmes: These points touch only on the profession's public relations; their direct relationship with the community, too, ought to be causing the BMA concern. The general practitioner must be thoroughly tired of hearing himself referred to by politicians as the lynch-pin of the profession,

when in fact he is treated more ,and more as a dispensing chemist. Funds for research are still

allocated as if mental illness, so much the most serious medical problem of the day, hardly mat- tered. Medical education lags half a century behind the times. concentrating on aspects of anatomy which are of little use to the ordinary doctor-to-be. The BMA has many serious prob- lems: it should not waste so much of its time on face-saving.