Abstract
THE Royal Sanitary Institute was founded in 1876. For more than forty years it has been, as it were, a chorus to interpret to the official and general public the methods of applying scientific ideas to the improvement of the environment and to the promotion of individual health. Among its earliest congress presidents it included Edwin Chadwick, Ward Richardson, Douglas Galton, and others well known in the history of the modern public health movement. The annual congress has always been a convenient occasion either for the announcement of some fresh application of hygienic ideas or for the discussion of administrative difficulties in their realisation. This year the congress was held at Folkestone. The Earl of Radnor was president. In his address he pleaded for the retention of the voluntary hospital system, arguing that unpaid medical service is somehow superior to paid service. There is, perhaps, a sense in which the consultants of the great and small hospitals are unpaid, but it is an abuse of words to suggest that they are philanthropists. The hospital problem, however, is rapidly coming to a point when discussion will yield to action, and with their usual elastic adaptivity our institutions will emerge into something better. The “science” of the transition will not be traceable until after the event. His lordship's plea was put with lucidity and dignity—a typically good illustration of a voluntary administrator's attitude. The later discussion on hospital service and medical service generally took a much wider sweep, and made manifest how far we have already travelled along the lines of official medical organisation. But this is a practical rather than a scientific question, and may safely be left to the administrators.
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Royal Sanitary Institute: Folkestone Congress, June 20–25. Nature 107, 567–568 (1921). https://doi.org/10.1038/107567a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/107567a0