Note 89 — Chapter VII

In a letter to the Lancet, a gentleman signing himself Stanley Haynes, M.D., suggests that the Government should erect vast establishments, to which “all persons ill with scarlatina, measles, roseola, variola, varicella, relapsing fever, typhus, enteric, or yellow fevers, diphtheria, pertussis, or cholera,” should be conveyed in spite of any remonstrances or resistance to the contrary; such establishments to be for all classes, and the removal of the patients to be insisted on, “whenever the medical officer of health is satisfied that isolation and disinfection will not be complete at home,”—even in this latter case the sick-rooms at home to be entered only by persons authorized by an officer of health. The writer says that this system “would be equal to the beneficial extension of the Contagious Diseases Acts to eruptive, continued, and mucous fevers.” He suggests that “much opposition would undoubtedly be roused by parents and others,” but that may be in time overcome, as the opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts is to be overcome, by custom, and education to the system. This scheme, which reads like a grim parody of the Contagious Diseases Acts, is indorsed by the Lancet, which speaks of the “importance” of Dr. Haynes’s letter.

In recent numbers of the Lancet there has been a correspondence on the desirableness, from the doctor’s point of view, of making it compulsory on all women of the humbler classes, on pain of fine or imprisonment, to be attended in childbearing by a male practitioner. One of the correspondents says there is such a provision in the new “Medical Bill,” but on looking through that Bill I cannot find such a provision, unless indeed it be artfully concealed in clause 29. The Lancet, it is well known, is ever the friend of compulsion and violent centralization, abounding in such expressions as the following:—“It is to be regretted that a well instructed and humane government does not exercise a firmer influence over the anarchy, the greed, the ignorance of local governing bodies. But the energetic use of the powers given by the Sanitary Acts would enable medical men to confer benefits on the public, the value of which defies estimation.”—Lancet. These benefits conferred by medical men, be it observed, are to be purchased at the expense of that power of self-government, disposition to help the law, and manly independence which, as we have seen, De Tocqueville, Montalembert, Niebuhr, Guizot, and a host of thoughtful English writers, have attributed to a great extent to the freedom of local governing bodies. It might be asked further, is there no danger of anarchy, of greed, of ignorance among medical men?