MEDICAL CONGRESS.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1236, 19 September 1911, Page 5

MEDICAL CONGRESS.

HOSPITAL CONTROL,

FOR THE SICK POOR ONLY. 13y Telegraph—Press Association— Copyright (nee. September 18, 9.20 p.m.) Sydney, September 18. The Australasian Medical Congress, after disposing of formal business, discussed the question of the abuse of hospitals by those able to pay. The rent interest o£ the debate centred round the attitude of the profession, towards the proposals recently made by Mr. Flowers, Acting-Chief Secretary, in favour of a general system of Stato hospitals. Dr. Worrall, of Sydney, said he hoped that whatever tho Ministers did the profession would fight to the last ditch against a proposal which was not only adverse to the interests of medical men, but also to the interests of tho sick poor. Dr. of Sydney, supported Mr. Flowers's scheme, but tho majority of the qther speakers wero more favourable to the continuation of the present voluntary system. Dr. Robertson, of Now Zealand, said tho mistake made in New Zealand hospital legislation -was that they had failed to adopt a primary understanding that the hospitals were intended for the sick poor. Tho Congress finally adopted .resolutions sotting out that, if Governments undertook tho entire financial support of hospitals, patients who were able to obtain medical services outsido the hospitals should bo excluded, and that boards of management should bo retained. PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. (Eec. September 19, 0.55 a.m.) Sydney, September 18. There was a brilliant gathering at the Town Hall to-night, when tho GovernorGeneral, lord Denrnan, formally opened the Australian Medical Congress. Dr. F. Antill Packley, in his presidential address, said that more universally and rapidly than at any previous time in its history, medicine was passing from the traditional and empiric, and becoming more rational and scientific. The discoveries made and foreshadowed threatened, not only to revolutionise medicine, but, within the limits which inexorable Nature ordains, profoundly to alter interracial relationships and to influence man's distribution on the face of the globo. This would be mainly through the bettor knowledge of tho causes and processes of microbic disease .and by. preventing, modifying, and controlling tho action of bacterial and protozoal organisms.