Dearth of candidates for the Army Medical Service : reply to letter of Secretary of State for War.

  • Handyside, P. D. (Peter David), 1808-1881.
Date:
[1878]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dearth of candidates for the Army Medical Service : reply to letter of Secretary of State for War. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    / X- 7 f f DEARTH OF CANDIDATES FOR THI MEDICAL SERVICE. 19.1( Reply to Letter of Secretary of State for Wan/ • School of Medicine, Edinburgh, 26th April 1878. Sir,—The Teachers in the School of Medicine, Edinburgh, in addressing themselves to a reply to the question put to them by Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, in your letter to them of date 21st March 1878, Ho. VW, “as to the specific causes which produce the existing difficulty in obtaining Candidates for the Army Medical Department,” and as to the grounds on which, in their opinion, the “ great unwillingness to compete for Commissions in the Army Medical Department has for some time existed on the part of Medical Students, and this notwithstanding that many measures for the improvement of the Department have been intro- duced by Mr Hardy and his predecessors,” have ascertained that the unpopularity of the Army Medical Service has arisen from the Medical Officers’ actual experience of two distinct sets of specific causes, the knowledge of which by professional aspirants fully accounts for the present dearth of Medical Officers in the Army; seeing that feelings within the Army Medical Department reflect <2 themselves without, and that the Students of Medicine are in- > fluenced by the opinion of those who have already served the Government. The whole matter of the present dead-lock for Candidates presents itself before the Teachers in a twofold aspect, viz.:—First, the Primary Causes, or Things of the Past; and, Secondly, the Secondary or Existing Causes that tend to repel the best men from joining the Army Medical Department. I. Primary Causes.—§ 1. A feeling that, for the last twenty years, faith has not been kept by the authorities towards the Senior Officers in the Executive Kanks of the Army Medical Service ; and, therefore, a consciousness of distrust and uncertainty is kept alive