Large fees and how to get them : a book for the private use of physicians / by Albert V. Harmon ; with introductory chapter by G. Frank Lydston.

  • Harmon, Albert V.
Date:
[1911], ©1911
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Large fees and how to get them : a book for the private use of physicians / by Albert V. Harmon ; with introductory chapter by G. Frank Lydston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    Of course, the college clinic is supposed to be a theater of instruction. Often, however, it is but a stage on which comedy-dramas are enacted.* A brilliant operation that nobody six feet away can see, and an operator bellowing at his audience like the traditional bull of Basham—in medical terms that confuse but do not enlighten, terms that are Greek to most of the listeners—this is the little comedy-drama that is enacted for students who have eyes but see not; who have ears but hear not. Instruction? Bah! Take the theatric elements and the plays to the gallery out of some college clinics and there wouldn't be a corporal's guard in attendance. '•■ < Worse than the free clinics are the so-called charitable hospitals. Much has been said of dispensary abuses, but few have had the courage to say anything in adverse criticism of these institutions. While nominally founded to fill a long-felt want—and the number of long-felt wants, from the hospital standpoint, is legion—these hos- pitals are founded on strictly business principles, save in this respect—the people who found them feed on their innate capacity to gel something for nothing. The first thing the founders do is to get a staff of doctors to pull the hospital chestnuts out of the fire. The members of the staff think that the hospital is performing the same duty for them, and everything is serene. And so the surgeon] goes on operating on twenty patients—fifteen of whom are able to pay him a fee—in the hope that one among them all is willing to pay him a fee. Exaggeration? Well, I cannot swear to the accuracy of the foregoing, but an eastern surgeon of world-wide \