Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Medical charity : its abuses and how to remedy them. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.
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![]27,362/., and of this amount 81,77N. was paid to the Medical Officers, in other words they received nearly two-thirds of the total amount expended under the Act. It has been calculated that if the number of those who are merely qualified and who practice as apothecaries, of those who do not practice owing to old age, of those holding appointments which preclude them from practice, and of those who devote their whole time to special scientific pursuits, together with the number of the retired Army and Navy officers and young men whose names appear on the Irish Register for a few months merely till they enter the Army or Navy or go to England or elsewhere, be deducted from the total number of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries in Ireland, the number remaining as physicians and surgeons in actual practice is about' 2000. Now the total number of Medical Officers engaged during 1872 in administering the district Dispensaries Act was 801. If to these be added the number of Medical Officers of the 163 Workhouses in Ireland> the total number engaged as Poor Law Medical Officers amounts to close upon 1000, or the half of the whole of the Medical men in actual practice in Ireland. Now, by means of the salaries which this large proportion of the whole of the Medical practitioners actually practising in Ireland receive as Medical Officers under the District Dispensaries Act, the young medical men of Ireland obtain an important start in life, and are enabled to support themselves in modest comfort during the period of struggle which most medical men have to pass through before they suc- ceed in establishing themselves in fairly remunerative practice. An argument often advanced in favour of the Out-patient Departments of English, and especially of London Hospitals, is that they afford an invaluable sphere in which the rising genera- tion of medical men obtain practice and experience of a most important kind, which otherwise would not be within their reach. The practice offered by the Irish District Dispensaries supplies all that which the Hospital Out-patient Departments eu|)ply in this respect and much more besides, for the experience obtained by visiting patients at their own homes—an experience presented by nearly a third of the whole of the District Dispen- sary cases—is in our opinion far more valuable than that of merely seeing and prescribing for patients in the out-patient consulting- room of a hospital or at an ordinary dispensary. But even this admirable Act—admirable in its design, and to a great extent in its working—is grossly misapplied, and by a reckless perversion of its agency that cardinal abuse of medical charity—viz., its bestowal on persons who are not entitled to it, presents itself as the chief, if not sole evil of the system. According tu the last Annual Report of the Local Government Board for lie-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22650489_0101.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
