NEED FOR CLINICS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4808, 9 February 1925, Page 3

NEED FOR CLINICS.

HIGH COST OF BEING HEALTHY. A BURDEN ON THE FAMILY. The cost of preserving good health is becoming increasingly burdensome to the middle classes, said Lord Dawson of Penn, the King's physician, in an address to the Insurance Institute of London. The more medical knowledge improved the larger the expense that fell upon .the head of the family. He had known of families crippled for 10 years by the heavy cost of modern methods of treating disease. Every family spent far more nowadays on the care of the teeth, on the tonsils and on the shape of the legs and the feet of the rising generation. “If it were not so, should we tolerate the hsort skirts which are in vogue to-day ?” he asked. The home was becoming less and less suitable as a place where illness could be treated. There was more need for institutional treatment. The arrival of a baby was lookel upon by the domestic s.tafT of a house as a matter of almost personal grievance. In very few homes would the servants tolerate illness.

Clinics and hospitals were needed for middle class families, but care should be taken not to separate the patient from the attention if his family doctor. Unless some solution of the present difficulty was found, the alternative would ultimately be a nationalised medical service.