Hospitals and infirmaries would be alike
nationalised, and, in place of the present antagonism between hospitals
and the bulk of the medical profession, every doctor would be in touch
with a hospital, thus having behind him a fully equipped and staffed
institution for all purposes of diagnosis, consultation, treatment, and
research, also serving for a centre of notification, registration,
preventive and hygienic measures. In every district the citizen would
have a certain amount of choice as regards the medical man to whom he
may go for advice, but no one would be allowed to escape the medical
supervision and registration of his district, for it is essential that
the central Health Authority of every district should know the health
conditions of all the inhabitants of the district. Only by some such
organised and co-ordinated system as this can the primary conditions of
Health, and preventive measures against disease, be genuinely socialised.
These views were put forward by the present writer twenty years ago in
a little book on _The Nationalisation of Health_, which, though it met
with wide approval, was probably regarded by most people as Utopian.
Since then the times have moved, a new generation has sprung up, and
ideas which, twenty years ago, were brooded over by isolated thinkers
are now seen to be in the direct line of progress; they have become the
property of parties and matters of active propaganda. Even before the
introduction of State Insurance Professor Benjamin Moore, in his able
book, _The Dawn of the Health Age_, anticipating the actual march of
events, formulated a State Insurance Scheme which would lead on, as he
pointed out, to a genuinely National Medical Service, and later, Dr.
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