Medicine, as we are practicing it, is a luxury trade. We are selling bread at the price of jewels… Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine, and purify our profession of rapacious individualism… Let us say to the people not ‘How much have you got?’ but ‘How best can we serve you?
Dr. Norman Bethune
Canadian Physician & Medical Innovator
The situation which is confronting medicine today is a contest of two forces in medicine itself. One holds that the important thing is the maintenance of our vested historical interest, our private property, our monopoly of health service distribution. The other contest that, the function of medicine is greater than the maintenance of Doctor’s position, that the security of people’s health is our primary duty that we are above professional privileges.
Dr. Norman Bethune
Canadian Physician & Medical Innovator
Let us redefine “Medical Ethics” – not as a code of professional etiquette between doctors, but a code of fundamental morality and justice between medicine and the people.
Dr. Norman Bethune
Canadian Physician & Medical Innovator
The treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis involves two problems. The first is that of the infected individual, regarded as a whole acting and reacting in his social and physical environment, and the second, the reaction of that individual’s body, and more particularly his lungs, to the presence of the tubercle bacillus. … the first problem then becomes chiefly an economic and social one, and the second, a physiological and immunological one. In the final analysis they are mutually reactive and inseparable. Trudeau well said, ‘There is a rich man’s tuberculosis and a poor man’s tuberculosis. The rich man recovered and the poor man dies.’ This succinctly expresses the close embrace of economics and pathology.
Dr. Norman Bethune
Canadian Physician & Medical Innovator
