Opening remarks by the president of the Public Medicine Section of the British Medical Association, at its meeting in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, August, 1870.

Date:: [1870]

Credit: Opening remarks by the president of the Public Medicine Section of the British Medical Association, at its meeting in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, August, 1870. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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$all the great cities of the empire—consisting of five, seven, ten, and in Rome of fourteen members. These provided the poor with all the care and succour which the art could then afford. The civil law interfered, not only to secure them fair salaries for their public duties, and reasonable remuneration for their private services, but to prevent that horrible corrup- tion and extortion which Pliny so mercilessly laid bare. The true principle of professional duty, then sanctioned and enforced by the law, showed the advance of a truer and deeper element of civilization. The statute of Valentinian and Valens thus refers to the Archiatri, whom it confirmed and regulated :— ' Qici scientes amionaria sibi commoda a 'populi commodis, honeste oisequi tenuiorihus malint qtiam turp'iter servire divi- tibus. Quos etiam ea patimur accipere quee saui offerunt pro obsequiis, non ea qum pericliiantes pro salute promittunt^' Why do I recall these remarkable facts, but to illustrate my proposition that a low standard of professional morality may be elevated, not only by the profession itself, but by the government of the country, which may legitimately interfere for the public protection ? It is the more important that the relations of Medical Ethics and State Medicine should be fully recognised; for it is in the matters of hospital and workhouse and sanitary appointments, and of evidence in courts of law, that breaches of high professional morality are, I am loth to say, most apparent. Have none of us witnessed the humiliating spectacle of a brother practitioner pandering to the greeds of vestry patronage, or to local-board jobbery, or to hospital cliquery ? Have not appointments been canvassed for while the holder was in articulo mortis ? Has the worth of a rival candidate never been indirectly depreciated, or damned with faint praise? Have the blandishments of the fair sex never been ° \Qod. Theod. lib. xiii. tit. iii. lex. 8.]$