Yorkshire Almanac Clifford Allbutt, supporting George Bernard Shaw’s proposal that medicine be socialised, gives a Yorkshire example of a physician drawn by vocation, not money

16 February 1909: Clifford Allbutt, supporting George Bernard Shaw’s proposal that medicine be socialised, gives a Yorkshire example of a physician drawn by vocation, not money

Lancet. 1909/02/27. Medico-legal Society Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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Sir T. CLIFFORD ALLBUTT said that he did not think it would pain Mr. Shaw much to say that they – most of them – agreed with very much that he had said. They all had their own trademarks. Mr. Shaw had the trademark of socialism. The names of those things did not much matter; it was the things themselves they were concerned about. He thought that there was a great deal of difference between competition. in trade and competition in a profession. If a man said “I sell a better soap than my neighbour” the ordinary person could find out readily whether it was better or not. But when it came to advertising that “I, Jones, am a better man than B or C,” that was a very different kind of competition. He thought that they could not put the two things together, because in the case of a doctor the public could not find. out, perhaps, whether they were in the hands of a skilful or an unskilful man. As to revelling in epidemics, he did not attach much weight to the expression, but he thought he ought to say that he had known one exceedingly able doctor in one of the Yorkshire dales who had a practice worth £1200 to £1400 a year. He had had to contend with an epidemic of typhoid fever and he had set himself day and night to deal with the matter and it had broken his sleep and health. In 20 years he had succeeded in eradicating that disease and the result was that he broke himself down and reduced his practice to £700 a year, at which figure his widow had had to sell it. That was the kind of revelling in epidemics which he thought was very common in the medical profession. He thought that it was a good thing that they had been led to realise that night, that under whatever flag it might be, the position was a very unsatisfactory one, and he admitted that it did want some such entire transformation as that which Mr. Shaw had sketched out.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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15 April 1924: Writing to The Lancet, Clifford Allbutt tells how a nursing hack eliminated (typhoid) thromboses in the Leeds fever hospital in the 1860s

19 September 1866: Ostentatiously breaking with medical tradition, Clifford Allbutt, physician, and Claudius Galen Wheelhouse, surgeon, cooperate at Leeds Infirmary to cure a pericarditis

13 April 1915: During the wartime Serbian typhus epidemic, Clifford Allbutt recalls the open-air treatment he used in the 1865-66 outbreak in Leeds

16 February 1886: Clifford Allbutt explains to James Crichton-Browne why three years later he was to trade a lucrative medical consulting career in Leeds for a less well paid Commissionership in Lunacy in London

9 July 1903: Clifford Allbutt, late of Leeds, tells a Bradford sanitary congress to reject the view that (preventive) medicine is antagonistic to the survival of the fittest

13 January 1893: The Independent Labour Party is born in Bradford as a result of the Liberal Party’s aversion to working class candidates and following a branding discussion

23 August 1933: John Betjeman witnesses the opening of the Leeds Civic Hall

29 June 1876: Uplifted, Harrogate parish church awaits the monstrous £1,800 Schulze organ from Thomas Stuart Kennedy’s Meanwood Towers, Leeds

1 May 1878: The Mercury quotes Clifford Allbutt (Leeds Infirmary) on the commendable beastliness of northerners

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Allbutt’s full article, “On Brain Forcing,” recapitulates the eternal debate between schoolteachers and physicians and was published in the inaugural issue of Brain (Allbutt 1878/04).

Hansard quotes the bishop thus: “I should say it would be better that England should be free than that England should be compulsorily sober.” But Hansard is (still) not always a faithful record, and “Better a nation of free drunkards than a nation of teetotal slaves” may be nearer the truth.

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