The Sun 42 WYMDHAM STREET. AUCKLAND SATURDAY, MARCH 22, 1930 DOCTORS AND SECRECY

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 928, 22 March 1930, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYMDHAM STREET. AUCKLAND SATURDAY, MARCH 22, 1930 DOCTORS AND SECRECY

IJVBRY lime a newspaper prints tlie portrait of a doctor or ** publishes an expert medical opinion in his name, it indicts the poor man for an unpardonable breach of his professional etiquette. It pillories him for unmoral conduct in the ethical sense and subjects him frequently to ferocious censure by administrative and other guardians of the strongest and most jealous association in the world. So, when the fixed face of a physician, or surgeon, or a medical professor, looks at you non-committally from amid newspaper illustrations do not sympathise with him if or because by some mischance the picture does or may not reveal him at his best, hut be sympathetic over the risk he runs in being revealed at all. These comments have been prompted by a severe editorial article in “The Medical Journal of Australia” on the abuse of medical ethics as representing the exacting science of the ideal human character in a great profession. Apparently over there, due possibly to the influence of careless political environment, several members of the Australian branch of the British Medical Association have become slack in conforming to that ethical standard which is best described and understood in the phrase: “It isn’t done.” Leaders of the medical profession are at any rate greatly concerned in regard to the attitude of a few members respecting three or four points in medical ethics. Sanctioned advertisements in lay newspapers concerning change of address, the beginning of practice, or the resumption of practice after illness (doctors, too, sometimes need medical attention and, like laymen, are occasionally glad to take aspirins and try old wives’ cures) have been just a bit too prominent, while other forms of advertisement, mostly free publicity, have been indulged in to the annoyance of practitioners. Although the article does not mention ‘it, there is reason to believe that some doctors actually have exceeded in their brass plates the prescribed dimensions of these sedate and shining signs. Then there has been what is called “the immoral act of splitting fees,” evidently between doctors, not between physicians and their patients.

As a solid basis for medical ethics the Australian censor of his rash colleagues asserts with gusto that “a wild animal has but one law to govern its behaviour: the law of its own protection.” On that ethical foundation tlie medical profession has become wilder in its own protective laws than the wildest of wild animals. Some twenty-three hundred years ago Hippocrates took a celebrated oath that information gained at the bedside shall be regarded as inviolable. The famous Greek physician’s enunciation of ethical principle has been binding upon his successors ever since, but they have gone farther and developed secrecy into a fetish of silence in one extreme and the garrulity of a special jargon in the other, so that none except themselves may know what they think or know or do not know. No doubt, nine times out of ten, reticence is perfect wisdom, while in m any instances reluctance to have photographs published is natural, easily understood and pardonable. But to talk about suppressing publication of doctors’ names as giving authority and weight to expert opinion or information, and forbidding the reproduction of portraits in lay newspapers, is to indulge in such foolishness as might well disturb the peace of Hippocrates in a world where “there shall be no more crying, neither shall there be any more pain.” It is about time the secretive medical profession realised that the world is changing rapidly under their so-called penetrating eyes, and that its transformation is probably more marked in medical science than in any other realm of progress. The lessons from the King’s illness and recovery have been plain enough to laymen. Must it be inferred that doctors and surgeons and all manner of specialists have overlooked or missed them ? And the main lesson was the fact that tens of thousands of sufferers learned through wide publicity that expert medical team work can save life in desperate circumstances. There was nothing exceptional or peculiar about his Majesty’s illness; the exceptional and peculiar thing about it was the candid way in which efficient specialists broadcast their difficulties and devices, and demonstrated the power of medical science. The result, together with the publication of portraits, may have been a good advertisement for the triumphant band that saved the King’s life, but it was a better advertisement for the whole medical profession all the world over. And so with the advancement of medical research. Without instructive publicity there would he little progress achieved, for publicity secures funds for splendid work. The public will not respond too readily if the medical profession breaks silence only when it wants money for obstetrical instruction and cancer research. And most important of all, lucid statements by medical experts on diseases and the prevention of disease would do more than anything else could do to dissuade foolish, if hopeless, sufferers from torturing themselves with quack poisons and concoctions or with kerosene. Let the next portrait of a physician who says or does something worth while be tagged with the appreciative note: “Here is a sensible man.” t