Medical politics : being the essay to which was awarded the first Carmichael prize, of £200, by the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland, 1873 / by Isaac Ashe.

  • Ashe, Isaac, 1834-1891.
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical politics : being the essay to which was awarded the first Carmichael prize, of £200, by the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland, 1873 / by Isaac Ashe. 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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    respects the applicants, from the ease with which the unde- serving could obtain letters, it helped greatly to weaken and destroy those habits of sturdy independence and forethought on the inculcation and preservation of which must mainly rest our hopes of diminishing pauperism; while, as regards the ladies and gentlemen who grant letters for the dispensary, they were evidently often deluding themselves with the notion of having done an act of Christian kindness, when, if I may be permitted to be a little metaphorical, they were thought- lessly sowing the seeds of servile dependence—a plant that takes deep and ready root in a community, and ripens rapidly into baneful fruit. It may be interesting to such persons to know that it was for a time my custom, when acting as surgeon at the dispensary, to say to those patients for whom I wrote certificates of inability to work, by which they obtained from their clubs sums of money during their sick- ness, varying from five to ten or more shillings a week, that I hoped when they became better and got to work again they would, in gratitude, give some trifling donation to the support of the institution; but, so far as I know, no one ever gave a sixpence. No doubt there are persons treated at all such dispensaries who are truly deserving objects of charity; and if gratuitous medical relief wa3 rigidly confined to such cases much good and no great harm might be done. But from a want of a strictly careful and honest discrimination, you find them treating gratuitously those, on the one hand, who are per- fectly able to pay for their own advice, and those, again, on the other, who ought to be under the care of the district medical officer. I could give examples of both in my own district to show how it interferes with the work of the general practitioner and helps to reduce the extra fees of the not-over-remunerated poor law officer. But it all helps to swell the number who attend at the dispensary, on which is largely founded the appeal for contributions from the charitable.