THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE GENERAL PRACTITIONER: TWO SIMILAR VIEWS—1872 and 1968

Abstract

In 1968 Doctor Helen M. Wallace in writing about the decrease in the number of general practitioners cites the following facts: It is clear from the existing data on medical manpower that although the total number of all physicians and of all pediatricians is increasing, the ratio of general practitioners to population is decreasing markedly. . . . For example, the ratio of general practitioners to the childhood population under fifteen years of age fell from 345 pen 100,000 in 1940 to a ratio of 135 in 1961.1 About a hundred years earlier Doctor J. B. Fonssagrives was similarly bothered by the disappearance of the family (general) practitioner. In a book widely read by mothers in the 1870's he wrote: In former times there was such a person as the family physician; he exists no longer, except in a few small towns where old-time customs are still kept up, and in which free thus far from the cosmopolitan mania, the various generations of a family quietly succeed each other under the same roof. But how vastly different (1872) is the ordinary course of events! The placid home life is becoming the exception; the house is giving place to the tent; we are born in one town reared in another, married in a third, and we shall die, God knows where. Thus situated–encamped as it were–we do not dream of providing ourselves with a physician. There comes an emergency, and we go from door to door in quest of the first one we may meet.