The Health bulletin [serial] - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

July, 1951 The Health Bulletin 13in the past tense. These are being made,day by day. But to be useful, such discoveriesmust be more than theoretical.They must be operative. Moreover, theymust be both provable and proved.Ranked With The GreatEach generation has given to theworld many discoveries to make thepeople happier, but possibly none hasmade more effective contributions thanthe present. This can be said because ofsuch men as Dr. MacNider and others,whose lives have been dedicated to thenoble purpose of releaving pain, mendingcrippled individuals and prolonginghuman life. With the possible exceptionof the religious ministry, there is notand never has been a higher calling onthe face of the earth than that of themedical doctor, no matter in whicla particularfield he has chosen to work.There are two broad fields of medicine—curative and preventive. Each occupiesan extremely important place. The twoare interdependent. Without preventivemedicine, additional thousands woulddie annually. BXit for curative medicine,the same would be true. It is ofen thecase that infection cannot be preventedand that its approach cannot be detected.Curative methods, however, havebeen discovered to combat practicallyall types of infection. On the other hand,methods have been discovered for theprevention of many crippling diseases.And so we see the inseparable twins ofmedicine — curative and preventive —walking arm in arm, and working handto hand to make this a healthier andhappier world to live in.WHAT GENERAL PRACTICE ISThe essence of general practice is tolive amongst your patients as a cog inthe whole machine, knowing them sowell in health and in sickness, and frombirth vmtU death, that although onemay keep—and should keep—a clinicalrecord of their illnesses, and althoughone should examine the patient as aroutine, the patient is so familiar to hisfamily doctor that he, of all people, canbe in the best position to give an accuratediagnosis, prognosis and treatmentmost suitable to the patient's way oflife.So proclaims a member of the RoyalSociety of Medicine,i and he goes on inlike vein.Whereas the patient in hospital islike an animal in the Zoo, living underconditions which are artificially madeas near normal as possible of course,but nevertheless out of his natural environment—thegeneral practitioner Isin the position of the big-game hunterEditorial From Southern Medicine andSurgery.IG. O. Barber, M. D., in Proc. Royal Soc.of Med. (London), Feb.studying the patient in his natural environment,the jungle, his lair, in thewild herd, in his home.There is a great deal more to a casein hospital than you can find out byexamining that case in hospital. Theessential causes and tendencies of healthor disease in an individual are in hisheredity and his environment; his parents,his family, his home, his work,his tastes and recreations. And we shallnot get the picture of these most importantfactors by merely asking thepatient about them; we shall obtain onlyhis very limited impression of them.General practice involves knowing allthese things, and applying them to thecase in point. The individual will reactto stress in an individual way. Generalpractice means such a knowledge ofone's patient that one can assess thetype of stress to which he is likely tobe subjected, and the way in which heis most likely to react or break down.The general practitioner should regardthe specialist departments as helpsto his treatment of the patient, ratherthan as places to which he sends hispatient and then be relieved of all fur-