nig Medicine
1 - dont tine . . . douteuse." The object of the exercise is not xplained. We never learn what obscure correlations,. what dices of social trend, what bases for prediction, this pioneer °Pod to discover. It would be rash to assume that none tad be found. After all, was there not for many years an . yerse correlation, far closer, than many confidently used as ,signiticant evidence, between the British birth-rate and the `ttlitage of bananas annually imported from the West Indies? 1(.1 i not a versatile mathematician at one of the older universities once discover that his personal income moved n ;rrfect harmony with the agriculturalists" Pig Cycle ? And Nay there is disclosed, in an eminently responsible publica- 'Lon and as part of the results of a perfectly serious enquiry c,,nnducted under official auspices., a harmony no less astonishing 'Tin these : an unmistakable connection between the amount °L medicine prescribed, under the National Health Service, in iany. town, and the proportion of that town's electors liable 'o ,Jury service. ,i he connection is demonstrated, in the course of a closely „ 'Ledsoned statistical report* into the distribution of prescriptions, °Y two investigators of the Social Survey. The higher the P,roportion of potential jurors, they find, the lower the ratio- ot prescriptions to consultations; this relationship is established °n the basis of data collected from no fewer than seventy-four c,„aunty boroughs. The evidence is too strong for incredulity. aPpressing a strong impulse to safeguard the house with a few sprigs of witch-hazel—for the suggestion of occult re.nr.respondences is, at first, irresistible—one considers, with ,Istlit8 hopes, the practical possibilities disclosed. Is there here, national chemist's a pointer to a cheap and easy way of reducing the leads chemist's bill ? If his pride in being on the jury list tags the citizen to moderate his demands for something funny- tasting in a bottle, if the satisfactions of status produce, through ills Which psychosomatic mechanism, a resistance to those ,1,1.s which funny-tasting mixtures may be expected to relieve, then, n. considering what the Health Service costs, for heaven's 1,1Ce let the qualifications for jury service be relaxed a little. „nes it really matter so very much about the rateable value Of a citizen's dwelling ? incomes below £3 must be either old age pensioners or chronic invalids, their case is a special one.) The investigators refine on their findings by analysing the sample prescriptions according to their nature : mixture, tablets, dressings and appliances, gargles, ointments, injections. Income makes little difference to the consumption of dressings and appliances. The habit of using National Health cotton-wool to stuff cushions is, one must suppose, fairly evenly distributed throughout the economic strata, and the appetite for injections, ointment and pharmaceutical oddments in general is equally unbiased. With mixtures and tablets the story is different. Even leaving the lowest income grade out of account, the weekly intake of tablets doubles as income sinks from 'over £10' to '£3 to £5' while the corresponding rate for mixtures rather more than trebles. The old consume more than the young, and women, except in the oldest age group, consume more than men; but these fairly comprehensible differences are much smaller than those dividing richer and poorer patients. The relationship between the J-index and the flow of medicaments is, in fact, neither as nonsensical nor as magical as it appears at first sight. This is at once a consoling and depressing thought. Con- soling, because one does prefer the universe to make sense; depressing, because it leaves one—in the immortal words of Mr. Stephen Potter—stuck with the So What ? ' diathesis. The statistical X-ray may disclose the arcane and subterraneous connections of things, but not the influences transmitted along them; the anatomy, but hardly the physiology, of the body politic. The poor consume more medicine than the compara- tively comfortable. So what ? Does the sequence run : poverty—lack of education—superstition—larger demand for magic potions and greater capacity, through the power of suggestion, to benefit by them ? Or is it, more simply, a matter of easier circumstances—greater willingness to buy cough-syrup over the counter rather than queue at the surgery ? (The sample, after all, refers to prescriptions and not to chemists' sales.) Or should one connect poor districts, harassed practitioners, and—overdriven human nature being sometimes weak—a tendency to prescribe near-placebos as the easiest way out ? What moral may be drawn about the charge on prescriptions, imposed since the investigation; or about the cost to the service of opening the benefits of nearly-free prescription to private patients ?
No answer emerges. One has to content oneself with a vague relief that the uncanny has,, in this instance, after all proved susceptible to rational explanation; with the faith that some equally rational, even if longer and more complex, chain of interconnections might, if all were known, prove to link together the Pig Cycle and the remuneration of university dons; with idle but pleasant speculation, even, on the possible significance to the destinies of the Third Republic of those hidden forces which propelled three hundred and seventeen widows (including one . . . doubtful) across the Pont Neuf one morning in the eighteen-nineties.
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