Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/611

Rh stigmatized because he must shift it—too heavy to bear—to the shoulders of other individuals who operate a free dispensary.

The present system prevents adequate and timely aid to those who need it. Many people, even within reach of dispensaries, dread the thought of patronizing them and often waste their earnings in buying nostrums from the neighboring drug store because they are cheap and because they seem to fit their case. Ofttimes they injure themselves more than they help. The pauper, who has lost all sense of deference to public opinion, goes at once to the dispensary and is adequately treated. But the vast multitude, too proud to patronize a dispensary and too poor to patronize a physician, run continual risk of neglecting serious illness.

The preservation of the public health is a matter of too great importance to be entrusted to the care of the person who is ill and who feels too poor to go to the doctor. The sick person becomes a non-producer and a care to his family and friends. If the father becomes ill the family becomes a public charge. If the children contract disease they suffer and die because the poverty of the parent prevents proper medical attendance. The masses of the people are too poor to avoid the risk of letting disease run into the danger period. Conditions demand nothing less than the removal of the stigma attached to dispensary patronage so that any person, be he rich or poor, can go to be treated. Medical attendance should be as free as the public schools. The healthy and well-developed body is as important as the healthy and well-developed mind. The two go together and the one can not be perfect without the other.

If, instead of lessening the amount of free medical attendance it were made universal the present fee system would be limited to the very wealthy and the physician for the common citizen would be placed on a salary basis. This would entail a large increase in public expenditures. Such an increase, however, would be a blessing in disguise in that it would fix public attention on the prevention of disease, thus lessening the amount of suffering in the community by eliminating the causes of it. It would open the way for a great number of people who are now deprived of proper medical oversight to consult a physician before real danger is present. It would eliminate the volunteer work and the charging of the rich to make possible the medical attendance of the poor. The emphasis in medical practise would be shifted from the curing to the prevention of disease. The physicians paid for by the state would become agents in removing the causes of disease. Instead of devoting exclusive attention to the cure of the consumptive or the one afflicted with other ills, contagious or otherwise, they would be concerned with the removal of the causes of the spread of the disease. The public physician would also become the agent for the dissemination of popular information on subjects of hygienic interest. In other words,