Medical Services for India

Abstract

FOR his address delivered at the Founder's Day Celebrations of the Lady Hardinge Medical College for Women, New Delhi, on March 17, Major-General J. B. Hance, director-general of the Indian Medical Service, took as his subject the need in India for a rapid and wide development of medical services, and he discussed the part which women will play in it. His address may be compared with Dr. Krishnan's presidential address to the Section of Medical and Veterinary Sciences at the Indian Science Congress held in January (see p. 658 of this issue). There is now, said General Hance, complete agreement throughout the world that health is a basic human right. Outlining the conditions required for 'positive health', he said that it is the goal of Indian medicine to provide these for every man, woman and child in India. The task is, as he and Dr. Krishnan clearly show, a formidable one; but it is no less evident that no responsible authority in India is going to shrink from it. The basis of the effort must be, General Hance emphasized, not this or that political philosophy, but "the united and indomitable will of the whole people to place their country on the map of modern civilised progress". Like Dr. Krishnan, he referred to the medical progress made in the U.S.S.R. during the last twenty years and he insisted that this has not been due to the Marxian philosophy, but to the united will of the Russian people. Nor need the cost of the effort required be a deterrent, for Lord Keynes and Prof. A. V. Hill, secretary of the Royal Society, have both reminded us that money is the servant and not the master of policy. The Allied war policy has proved that this can be so, for, if money had governed the prosecution of this War, hostilities would have ended long ago in the victory of the immensely superior financial resources of the Allies.