[On provident dispensaries as a means for promoting the public health].

  • Christie, James, 1829-1892.
Date:
[1880]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: [On provident dispensaries as a means for promoting the public health]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    wait an hour or two, and which, most likely, they never took. The whole affair became necessarily a pious, or rather a charitable, fraud—a fraud on both contributors and patients, medical officers and students. While the leading medical men of London, and specially those whose names are familiar to us in connection with the hospitals, were moving in the matter of hospital reform, the Charity Organization Society, having for its object the improvement of the permanent condition of the poor, came to the conclusion that one of the most powerful of the causes by which their condition had been depressed was this system of gratuitous, indiscriminate medical relief; and that every other arrangement for their benefit must fail in producing its full effect while this evil remained unremedied. The Council of the Society, therefore, appointed a committee to investigate the matter, and, in October, 1871, this committee made a report, pointing to “ a large development of the provident principle ” as the appropriate remedy for the abuses of the medical charities; and submitting model rules for the manage- ment of Provident Dispensaries, based upon the experience of those institutions. The Charity Organization Society have held three conferences on the subject: one in 1871, which was attended by Mr. W. H. Smith, M.P., and by Mr. Stansfeld, M.P.; the second under the presidency of Dr. Acland, the president of the General Medical Council; and the third under Lord Frederick Cavendish. In 1875 a large and influential section of the medical profession, resident chiefly in London, moved in regard to the question of hospital and-free dispensary abuse as inflicting a serious injury upon many deserving members of the medical profession; and a petition was presented to the president and committee of council of the British Medical Association, to take into consideration the relation of the medical profession to the hospitals and free dis- pensaries throughout the kingdom. When called upon by the com- mittee “to devise some measure of reform,” it was proposed, inter alia, that at all hospitals and free dispensaries there should be some system whereby on effectual inquiry might be made into the social condition of the applicants for medical charity, and their ability or non-ability to pay something for themselves; and that, in the development of the “ Provident System,” and the various modifications of which it is susceptible, a remedy might perhaps be found for the evils which have become apparent.