Norman Bethune - The Wounds

The Wounds

Norman Bethune

1939

Little Books of Hope

Alive Press Limited

6 Meyer Drive, Guelph, Ontario

Managing Editor: M M. Pickersgill

We acknowledge the assistance of Progress Books. Toronto, in compiling this collection and the assistance of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist Leninist) for the loan of the photographs included herein.

For information on other books in the series: Little Books of Hope, and for information on bulk purchases, contact the Managing Editor.

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Tonight there has been shown the most interesting case ever presented to the Society. It is the case of the People versus the Doctors. We are acting both as defendant and Judge. It behooves us to apply our minds with the utmost objectivity to this question. This case is an ethical and moral problem in the field of social and political economics, and not medical economics alone. Medicine must be envisaged as embedded in the social fabric and inseparable from it. It is the product of any given social environment. The basis of any social structure is economic. The economic theory and practice in this country is termed capitalistic. It is founded on individualism, competition and private profit. This capitalistic system is undergoing an economic crisis commonly called the depression. This is not a temporary illness of the body politic, but a deadly disease requiring systematic treatment. Systematic treatment is called, by the timid, radical remedies. Those palliative measures as suggested by most of our political quacks are aspirin tablets for a syphilitic headache. They may relieve, they will never cure.

Medicine is a typical, loosely organized, basically individualistic industry in this catch as catch can capitalistic system, operating as a monopoly on a private profit basis. Now, it is inevitable that medicine should undergo much the same crisis as the rest of the capitalistic world and should present much the same interesting and uncomfortable phenomena. This may be epitomized as poverty of health in the midst of scientific abundance of knowledge of disease. Just as thousands of people are hungry in a country which produces more food than the people can consume (we even burn coffee, kill hogs and pay farmers not to plant wheat and cotton), just as thousands are wretchedly clothed though the manufacturers can make more clothing than they can sell, so millions are sick, hundreds of thousands suffer pain, and tens of thousands die prematurely through lack of adequate medical care, which is available but for which they cannot pay. The problem of medical economics is a part of the problem of world economics and is inseparable and indivisible from it. Medicine, as we are practising it, is a luxury trade. We are selling bread at the price of jewels

Permit a few categorical statements. Dogmatism has a role in the realm of vacillation.

The best form of providing health protection would be to change the economic system which produces ill-health, and liquidate ignorance, poverty and unemployment. The practice of each individual chasing his own medical care does not work. It is unjust, inefficient, wasteful and completely outmoded. Doctors, private charity and philanthropic institutions have kept it alive as long as possible. It should have died a natural death a hundred years ago, with the coming of the industrial revolution in the opening years of the 19th century. In our highly-geared, modern industrial society there is no such thing as private health all health is public. The illness and maladjustments of one unit of the mass affects all other members. The protection of the peoples health should be recognized by the Government as its primary obligation and duty to its citizens. Socialized medicine and the abolition or restriction of private practice would appear to be the realistic solution of the problem. Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine, and purify our profession of rapacious individuals. Let us make it disgraceful to enrich ourselves at the expense of the miseries of our fellow man. Let us organize ourselves so that we can no longer be exploited as we are being exploited by our politicians. Let us re-define medical ethics not as a code of professional etiquette between doctors, but as a code of fundamental morality and justice between medicine and the people. In our medical society let us discuss more often the great problems of our age and not so much interesting cases; the relationship of medicine to the State; the duties of the profession to the people; the matrix of economics and sociology in which we exist. Let us recognize that our most important contemporaneous problems are economic and social and not technical and scientific in the narrow sense that we employ those words.

Medicine, like any other organization today, whether it be the Church or the Bar, is judging its leaders by their attitude to the fundamental social and economic issues of the day. We need fewer leading physicians and famous surgeons in modern medicine and more far-sighted, socially-imaginative statesmen.

The medical profession must do this as the traditional, historical and altruistic guardians of the peoples health: let us present to the Government a complete, comprehensive program of a planned medical service for all the people, then, in whatever position the profession finds itself after such a plan has been evolved, that position it must accept. This apparent immolation as a burnt offering on the altar of ideal public health will result in the profession rising like a glorious Phoenix from the dead ashes of its former self.

Medicine will be entirely re-organized and unified, welded into a great army of doctors, dentists, nurses, technicians and social service workers, to make a collectivized attack on diseases and utilizing all the present scientific knowledge of its members to that end.

Let us say to the people not how much have you got? but how best can we serve you? Our slogan should be we are in the business for your health.

Socialized medicine means that health-protection becomes 1st, public property, like the post office, the army, the navy, the judiciary and the school; 2nd, supported by public funds; 3rd, with services available to all, not according to income but according to need. Charity must be abolished and justice substituted. Charity debases the donor and debauches the recipient. 4th, its workers to be paid by the State with assured salaries and pensions; 5th, with democratic self-government by the Health workers themselves.

Twenty-five years ago it was thought contemptible to be called a Socialist. Today it is ridiculous not to be one.

Medical reforms, such as limited Health Insurance schemes, are not socialized medicine. They are bastard forms of Socialism produced by a belated humanitarianism out of necessity.

The three major objections which the opponents of socialized medicine emphasize are: 1st, loss of initiative. Although the human donkey probably needs, in this state of modern barbarism, some sort of vegetable dangled in front of his nose, these need not be golden carrots but a posy of prestige will do as well. 2nd, Bureaucracy. This can be checked by democratic control of organization from bottom to top. 3rd, the importance of the patients own selection of a doctor. This is a myth; its only proponents are the doctors themselves not the patients. Give a limited choice say of 2 or 3 doctors, then if a patient is not satisfied, send him to a psychiatrist. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander the doctor must also be given his own selection of patients. 99 per cent of patients want results not personalities.