Need Doctors Cringe?
1 August 1987
When I entered medicine more than fifty years ago, few maladies could be effectively treated. Lobar pneumonia, diabetes, pernicious anaemia, malaria and a few others. Patients with other disorders received careful medical attention while the illness ran its natural course,' unless the doctor made it worse. A warm relationship with the doctor eased the burden of serious illness for the patient and his family. Relentless killers which raged then have now vanished; poliomyelitis, tuberculosis, diphtheria, syphilis and smallpox. Childbirth was hazardous to mother and baby. There was no specific treatment for psychotic illness. Psychiatric research related mainly to taxonomy. A quarter of asylum inmates had general paresis, which killed them in a few years; today, thanks to penicillin, it is rare. 50 years ago, surgeons could treat many life-endangering conditions. They thought that physicians were pretentious tinkerers whose professional high spot was a brilliant diagnosis confirmed by a brilliant post-mortem.