Home Progress Health Education Ideals Author:Various HOME PROGRESS PUBLISHED BY HOUCHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY, 4 PARK STREET, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, FOR THE HOME PROGRESS COURSES THE RELATION OF THE DOCTOR TO THEHOME BY DR. RALPH KENDRICK SMITH WHAT is the relation of the physician to the home What should it be. Unfortunately, the answers to these two questions are not the same. Preventive medicine is ... more »more important than curative medicine, but the average family will not employ a private practitioner to do the more important work. Doctors are only paid when patients are sick. How often do we hear a person say, I am not quite sick enough yet to call the doctor. The home is the place where preventive medicine can best be practised. Sanitary science, pure water-supply, sewage systems, hospitals, health boards, etc., are a vital and necessary part of scientific d progress but of infinitely greater importance is the work done in the home. Whatever progress is made in public hygiene and sanitation is of little avail as long as the family life continues to be governed by tradition, and as long as the present custom of inadcquate relation with the family doctor is continued. The story of evolution in real preventive medicine is to be told in the home, not in schools of sanitary engineering. In factories, schools, and public buildings, we have official inspectors who make regular visits and compel compliance with certain definite regulation for the conduct of such places. If these rules are not obeyed, there exists the conventional machinery for enforcing them. But in our homes there is no such inspection, and, even if there were, there is no power to enforce the rules Iaid down by the inspector. Why is it that health is necessary and compulsory in factory, school, and public building, but not in the home there can be, however, an inspector in every home. The family physician should be the inspector. It is not his fauIt that he is not. It is the fault of the people themselves, the patients who are his employers. People, as a rule, will not pay a physician to keep them from getting sick...« less