lii PROCEEDINGS. 



have reached. The fact is that most of us Britons acquire 

 the knowledge of any foreign language — dead or living — 

 only with the greatest difficulty. It is not that the life of 

 the ancient Greeks and Romans does not interest us, but 

 since the way to it lies through the drudgery of acquiring a 

 foreign grammar and vocabulary, we shrink from the dis- 

 tasteful task. The British difficulty in learning languages 

 is in marked contrast with the Russian ease in this matter. 

 Closely allied to the subject of official recognition of men 

 of science is that of the advisability of organizing the medical 

 profession into a Department of Public Health, a Govern- 

 ment Department with its medical officers, state-paid and 

 state-pensioned. In other words, although preventive Medi- 

 cine is state-controlled, curative Medicine is still the same 

 old, unorganized, happy-go-lucky competition it ever was. 

 Some thinkers assert that the time has now come for the 

 appliced sience of curative medicine to be taken over by 

 the state and organized into a system. Both departments — 

 preventive medicine and curative medicine — would be under 

 the Department of the Minister of Science. Naturally there 

 would be but one portal of entrance with one uniform stand- 

 ard of entrance examniation into the Departments of Cura- 

 tive State Medicine and of Preventive State ^Medicine'. 

 The one uniform standard of entrance would remove a great 

 many existing anomalies. The doctor would then be to 

 the whole public what the club doctor is to a section of it. 

 He would have to attend to the care of cases exactly like 

 the M. O. H. attends to the prevention of cases. He would 

 be a state official, salaried and pensioned as such. It is 

 an anomaly if your child has scarlet fever that, while one 

 aspect of the case can properly be taken in hand by an official 

 only of the one aspect of medical science, the other aspect 

 of the case has to be left to private medical enterprise. I 

 should be able to summon a state-paid physician for a case 

 of broken leg, pneumonia, or of insanity, just as I do one 



