THE DOCTORS AND MR. BEVAN •
Sm,—While admitting that the doctors have at least some ground for protest, you suggest that Mr. Bevan is on strong ground for opposing the sale of practices, and that we are taking an untenable position in the matter of the direction of doctors—which you maintain is, in fact, not direction at all. The basis of our objection in both cases is the question of freedom. Both questions are interrelated. By forbidding the sale of practices, and at the same time setting up Medical Practice Committees to decide whether or not a doctor from outside should practise in any given area, Mr. Bevan is, in fact, directing doctors, since the liberty we now possess of practising our profession where we please is taken away. We must first obtain the permission of some local committee, and if they turn down our application we shall have to search until we find a committee that will accept our services. If journalists were com- pelled to apply to some local committee before they could start a news- paper or magazine one can easily imagine the outcry of The Spectator against such a tyrannical interference with the Freedom of the Press (in capital letters).
The fact that private practices are no longer " private " is irrelevant A good man will attract patients anywhere, and he should be at liberty to benefit by the skill and labour by which he builds up a big practice. Every one of us for generations has bought his practice, and none of us is the worse off for it after a number of years_ The very fact of having to pay for it is a guarantee to his patients that the doctor will strain every nerve to give the best that is in•him in order, on the lowest plane, to meet his obligations. When, however, a practice is handed to a man on a plate—well, we are all human, and, as has been proved • in other parts of the world with a State medical service, the standard of medical service will progressively decline. Therefore we doctors do not want it—and what is more, we won't have it.—Yours, &c., Lavernock, Histon, Cambridge. A. E. MOORE.
Sit,—The next number of your journal will appear coincidently with the B.M.A. voting-paper as to acceptance or rejection of the National. Health Service proposals. As one who has divided a long medical life between private and State-run practice I shall be among the yes-men in the " retired " category. After fifteen years of starting and nurturing a sanatorium enterprise we sold our foundling to a joint county authority, but continued to look after it for a much longer time. The fears we felt and the tribulations we anticipated melted away as a happy relationship became established. The work was enabled to go forward as could not have been the case without State resources behind it.
' For forms of government let fools contest.
" Whateet\ is best administered is best."
—Yours, &c., ESTHER CARLENG, ex Med. Supt., Berks and Bucks Joint Sanatorium, 36 Russell Road, Moor Park, Northwood, Middlesex.
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