HARLEY STREET.

Shannon News, 8 April 1924, Page 4

HARLEY STREET.

Nobody, except perhaps a Londoner who generally knows his city less well than other people needs to be told where Harley Street is. It is a long straight thoroughfare,half a mile from end to end, just" north bf Oxford Cir cus. The name is used frequently to include adjacent streets as well,in all of which the great majority of the householders are members of the medical profession. What is more, they are at the tip-top of their profession, its aristocracy, its House of Lords. They are the specialists and consultants to whom general practitioners send their cases for an opinion when the appendix is suspicious or the heart has a murmur.

Recently I had the curiosity to count the number of doctors’ brass plates in Harley Street, all of them shining "like a May morning. They totted up to 374 As there are 150 houses in the street, every house must have, on. the average, two doctors and a half doctor, h-e truth is, of course, that many of these medical men live elsewhere, and gain all the dignity and.circumstance of a Harley Street address by renting consulting roorii in the house of a colleague. Running parallel with Harley Street is Wimpole Street, which continues itself as Upper Wimpole Street and Devonshire Place, and here, again; there are just over 300 doctors’ brass plates. Another parallel thoroughfare, a shorter one, is Welbeclc Street, with almost 100; and then there are three intersecting streets — Queen Arinc Street, Weymouth Street, and New Cavendish Street —which together add to the medical population of this locality 180 more.

I question whether there is anything to. equal such an aggregation; not the watchmakers of Clerkenwell, nor the artists of Chelsea, nor the bootmakers of Bethnal Green, nor the. tanners of Bermondsey, nor the coachbuilders of Long Acre, nor tihe editors of Fleet Street. The nearest parallel is furnished by the Inns of Court, where the lawyers trample on the top of one another, and butt one another in the side.

Imagine Harley Street on a busy morning. Take it! in what is called cross-section and examine it. Think of the thousand telephones of the Langham and Mayfair exchangosquivering with the appointuiouis.. Th'.nk of a thousand patients in a thousand consulting rooms desrubing their woeful symptoms to a thousand medical men. Think of a thousand medical men at a thousand handsome desks jotting down particulars, mostly in undecipherable script. Think of the differential stethoscopes sounding the chest, the laryngeal mirrors exploring the throat, the self-registering perimeters mapping ou t the limits of vision, the electro-cardiographs tracing the heart-beat, the microscopes discovering the bacillus, the galvanic battery testing the muscles, the X-rays lighting up the whole body and discovering everything about you, madam, from the hairpins in your head to the nails in your high-heeled shoes. —Allan Green in the Sunday at Home.”