LOOKING FORWARD

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22521, 1 October 1938, Page 21

LOOKING FORWARD

EBy a MEDICAL < ONE hundred years hence the medical services of mankind will probably be divided into two main groups. An International Preventive Medicine Convention will have become necessary through the facilities then available for rapid air transport, and this body will rigidly control and prevent the spread of all the infectious diseases —including some' disorders, such as cancer, which by that time will have been shown to have an infection as part of their cause.

Another important aspect of the international health services will be concerned with nutrition and diet 7 so that deficiency diseases will have been completely stamped out arid resistance to infection raised to a high level. Wholesale immunisation of young children against each and all of the usual childhood ailments (measles, and so on) will be carried out as a matter of course, and other common infections, such as “colds” and consumption, will be likewise completely controlled by preventive inoculation.

Medicine in 2038

IOKBESPONDENT.I The second group of health work will be on a national or, regional basis, and its activities will be in three main divisions— maternity and care of the child, dealing with the results of accidents, and provision for easy dying. With a decreasing population it is clear _ that .in 100 years the birth of a child will be _ a most important matter and one in which the State will be vitally interested. Picked members of the medical profession will be drafted into a national maternity service, and an important part of tfneir work will also be supervising the. health of the growing child with the aid of the international body already mentioned. .

Old age, and the wearing out of the tissues of the body, will be the usual cause of death among those who survive accidents, and for this group special homes will have been set up, where, even if euthanasia or easy death has not been legalised, such measures will be employed as to make man’s last illness as comfortable as possible. Old-fashioned general practitioners trained in the early twentieth century methods will be used to staff these establishments.