Patients have families / Henry B. Richardson.

  • Henry B. Richardson
Date:
1945
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Patients have families / Henry B. Richardson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the results could be expressed in numerical terms and stated in tables or graphs. The fact that important branches of scientific knowledge, such as geology and evolution, were developed by descriptive methods escaped notice. When psychiatry came to the fore it was denied the right to be called scientific, on the ground that it did not conform to the narrow definition of the term. The ideal of the scientist had come to be the experiment in pure physics, in which the conditions could be narrowed to such a degree that a numerical answer could be obtained. Biology could not be so exact, but the closer to the ideal the better. In medicine this ideal served to build most of our knowledge of disease. It is not the method itself which is open to objection, but only the limitations in concept which were superimposed on it, and the exclusion from medical thinking of other sciences to which exact methods could not be applied. In 1916, when I was an interne, great emphasis was laid on medi cine as a science. Dr. Peabody, later professor of medicine, was studying the respiratory system in heart disease, work which gave him national recognition. Later he earned a wide reputation as a humanist; in other words, he was able to make the synthesis of the medical and the human aspects of disease. This was the period when the concept of the full-time academic worker reached its peak, not only in the preclinical sciences, but also in the clinical departments. Full-time meant that a doctor was paid by salary and gave all his time to hospital work. In some insti tutions he was allowed to treat private patients who came to the hos pital; but he did not usually regard this as a privilege, for it interfered with other hospital work. Academic meant a combination of teaching, clinical work in the hospital wards, and research, each of these activities operating as a stimulus to the others. Worker was a designation of the physician as primarily a scientific worker. The concept of the full-time worker still holds, and deservedly so; but it is qualified in practice by the admixture of many part-time phy sicians, those whose primary interests are outside the hospital. The house staff, who are shrewd judges of their visiting men, like an alternation between the full-time and the part-time doctors. It is felt