DOCTORS & SPECIALISTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 March 1939, Page 3

DOCTORS & SPECIALISTS

ADVANCES IN MEDICINE AND SURGERY. “I have the highest regard for the real specialist,” writes Dr Ayilliam N. Macartney in his book, “Fifty Years a Country Doctor,” "A very large proportion of the advances made in medicine and surgery are directly due to those who have made a special and intensive study along definite and circumscribed lines. The general practitioner and the specialist have each their legitimate field of endeavour. Neither can hope to coyer the whole field, but each can at least have a good general knowledge of the other’s line of work. But at least the broad highway of general practice gives a better view than the limited alleyway of specialism. As for old theories, we have lived long enough to se.e old theories rediscovered. We ape too prone, in discarding old ideas, in grasping new theories, to consider the ancients as something like foreigners, a little less than human. We are prone to fprget that we will, ourselves, be ancients quite soon enough and that we are foreigners indeed to the inhabitants of other lands. We should remembers that human nature, basically, is much the same tpe wopld over and down the centuries, that no age and no locality has a monopoly of knowledge or wisdom and that it is unsafe to be too dogmatic in anything pertaining to the practice of medicine.”