THE DOCTOR AND THE DOCTORS.*
In E Doctor and the People : that is a good title. The Doctor and the State : that is a bad one. Dr. Woodcock chose a good title for a good book. He has written, in excellent style and with careful judgment, of the doctor's education, work, experi- ences, and hopes : and, through it all, through all the problems of contract practice, the poor-law, the Midwives Act, and so forth, you are thinking of the People, not of the State. You are at bedsides, in the wards of a hospital, in a nursing home, or down in the slums: it is flesh and blood, pain and infirmities, life and death, that you are looking at : not Parliament, nor Whitehall. You are faintly conscious that there is, some- where, something called the Government, which is supposed to be looking after something else, another abstraction, called the State : but you are hardly thinking of either of them. Observing the strength of the traditions, privileges, habits, and authority of the medical profession, you find it difficult to believe that any sort of "outside interference" could guide or simplify or speed-up such an elaborate system, wheels within wheels, of long-established machinery. Face to face with certain shifts and worries and iniquities of club- practice, "the insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes," you say to 'our- self that no quantity nor quality of legislation will ever disentangle this conflict of claims. Down in the slums, down in the wreckage, among lives ruined by drink and venereal disease, what do you care for politics P Here is a book, emotional, strung to concert-pitch, full, from cover to cover, of a man's passionate interest in his own education, his own work, his own cases. He cannot get away from all that is most personal and most individual. It is the People, that is nearest to his heart : it is not the State.
Somebody has said that the doctor, when he writes well, writes very well indeed : and Dr. Woodcock, within the limits of an elo- quence which sometimes finds it hard to be shorn of its wrath, writes very well indeed. His book is receiving general atten- tion and admiration. But, to those who are of his profession, and have shared his experiences, the book has this especial advantage, that it gives a clear picture of our present uncertainty of the future. If we could only be quite sure, that the State is the People and the People are the State, we should know where we stand : as things are, we do not.
Of late, the doctors have been coming into all the rush of talk about the Insurance Act. We all talk of " the doctors." But here is a brand-new phrase of most profound significance. Nobody, three years ago, ever talked of " the doctors "; unless it was a matter of more than one doctor attending a patient. Then it was, " What do the doctors think ? " Three years ago, this question was answered by a bulletin, signed by a couple of doctors : to-day, it is answered by an ultimatum, signed by thousands of them. Who had ever imagined that the doctors would ever unite over anything P It is wonderful ; the change has come so quickly : it has been driven so deep into the very existence of the Act. All of a sudden we found that the doctors had been mobilized, drilled, armed, and sent to the front. For the first time in the history of England, the medical profes- sion is in the thick of political warfare : and there is every reason to believe that they are a body of first-rate fighting men. It would be a waste of time, to inquire by what in- genious uses of meetings, pledges, branch societies, councils, and so forth, they were enlisted, It is possible that nobody is more surprised at the result than they are. The fact remains that here they are, and that they mean business.
The Doctor and the .Pecryk. By H. De Curie Woodcock. London: Methuen and Co. [Os.]
Neither is it open to doubt, that their action has been generally approved. Here or there, one comes across things said against them, the old things about the doctor's cupidity, narrowness, and stupidity. But all that sort of talk, though it may affect the doctor, does not touch the doctors: Nobody but a fool thinks that the whole medical profession, after many centuries of individualism, has suddenly become a trade-union for the purpose of money-grubbing. Public opinion has understood and accepted, once and for all, these two points : that cheap doctoring is bad doctoring, and that the medical profession ought not to be underpaid.
But there is more than that, in the great change which has already come to pass in the medical profession. Things will never be the same again. The old isolation, the old content- ment with a tiny practice, begin to look out of date. The satisfied trio of the squire, the parson, and the doctor, seems to have come out of the Vicar of Wakefield, out of the period when the doctor was a doctor, not one of the doctors. " Those beastly politics," said one of the greatest surgeons of the Victorian Age: but the least and the youngest of doctors, now-a-days, is ahead of that saying. Doubtless, it is all for the best ; it would never do for one good custom to cor. rapt the world. Why should not the doctors be political? They know much more about politics, in the proper Greek sense of that word, than the average member of Parliament: indeed, some of them know more than the average member of the Labour Party.
Only, the height and depth and breadth of the change which has come over the doctors, look at it which way we will, are tremendous. We think of the Hospitals. It will be a colossal affair, to adjust the Hospitals to the Act. The Hospital system is as hard a subject to understand completely as Home Rule or Welsh Disestablishment. We think of the Friendly Societies. The work of adjustment between the doctors and them offers another labyrinth of difficulties. It is not to be doubted, that the doctors have done well, over the Act, to plunge into politics : but they have been compelled to plunge into a sea of troubles.
Happily, we may have a fair measure of confidence, that they will keep firm hold, now that they are united, of something better than a mere power for concerted action. Each one of them, if he be a wise man, will be more than ever careful to do good individual work. He must give his utmost attention to each separate ease : he must maintain, by every possible means, a personal good feeling between himself and every one of his patients : he must be as individualist as the original Good Samaritan. No amount of politics must tempt him, for a moment, off the exercise of high personal influence. That is the charm, to a doctor, of this book on The Doctor and the People. It looks out over politics : indeed, it is political : but it looks out from the vantage-ground won by years of hard, keen, generous work done, not for any abstract idea of the State, but for each separate unit of the People.
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