BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1233 



Biology and Medicine; what Common Policy? — Politics? 

 No ; for though schools of law and economics, if not even history, are 

 more than ever frizzling in politics, and University Unions voice and 

 train for it, the student of medicine or its associated sciences, 

 remains mostly immune to its fever. Usually, he thinks, because 

 too busy, or as they think, too individualistic; but really because 

 he "does not dance that dance" — since neither abstract eloquences 

 nor forensic debate, be these of nationalistic or mechanistic, financial 

 or proletarian type, as yet appreciably come to touch biologic and 

 medical thought, or their applications. If and when the biologist or 

 the physician looks into the arena of politics, does not that seem 

 too much a debate of barristers unemployed or amateur, rather than 

 that observant survey, interpretative diagnosis, and cautiously 

 experimental treatment, as of evils towards their abatement and 

 prevention, which the medical mind is more directly engaged with. 

 Yet in his attention to the pains and dangers of individual life, the 

 busy physician gains many social impressions, with ideas and larger 

 purposes accordingly. Among these, hygiene has long been in 

 development, and now seems fairly sure with the opening genera- 

 tion ; and eugenics, with its vigorous appeals, also looks forward for 

 fuller medical and social consideration. 



Why is progress thus so slow in the social levels, so that cities 

 are still so unwholesome and under-housed, country villages so 

 often proportionally yet worse off, as compared with what they 

 should and so easily might be? The wheels of politics seldom fit 

 and move ours, nor as yet conversely. What intermediate agency 

 is needed, beyond the occasional "crank", more useful than he 

 gets credit for? One answer, at least, is surely — Citizenship. Thus 

 so representative a medical city as Edinburgh has had, though only 

 once in its history, so far as we know, a biologically-minded physician 

 and hygienist for its Lord Provost, so with a record clearing-up of 

 some of its slums accordingly, on sound lines of conservative 

 surgery still too uncommon; and lately, at Aberdeen, a vigorous 

 citizen in that high office became aroused to the need of renewed 

 hospital development ; with speedy and large result, indeed a record, 

 many times beyond the not inconsiderable hospital generosities of 

 London. Private agencies, uniting the endeavours of hj^giene and 

 citizenship, have also done much, and may before long do more. 

 Here, too, it is not a little encouraging to cite the little story of 

 Lord Dawson, the senior physician of the King during his long 

 illness in 1929, who, when congratulated on his success and that of 

 his colleagues, but with the additional remark of "what a pity so 

 few patients could have such advantages" — replied that they and 

 he were proud to be able to say that the King, though necessarity 

 treated in his own house, had been as well taken care of, and with 

 team-work, etc., as if he had been a patient in a good hospital! 



VOL. II KK 



