The general practitioner

. . . The general practitioner of 50 years ago sat in his street corner surgery in secluded dignity and charged his fees according to his judgement, his conscience, or his patient’s ability to pay. His successor today is presented with a book of charges which divides the practice of medicine into more than 8,000 “items”, with references and cross references and definitions of charges according to length in centimetres, depth, anatomical regions and boundaries. Medical historians of the future will have an easy time to prove the decadent barbarism of this humanistic profession in the second half of the 20th century.