FROM THE LIBRARY
THIRTY-EIGHT PHYSICIANS SEEK RURAL PRACTICE
Considerable concern has been manifested by welfare associations and those interested in rural community life, by the apparent growing tendency on the part of physicians to move their residence from the rural districts to the larger centers, where hospital and laboratory facilities will be more accessible. In some instances this withdrawal has occasioned considerable alarm on the part of the community thus apparently forsaken.
A more careful study of the problem recently thrust upon this office has afforded an opportunity for seeing the matter from another angle. In a majority of instances the community lost its old family physician because Father Time had a claim upon him, and no young man has offered to take up his practice because, with the advent of the automobile and good roads, it is possible for the residents of such communities to call a physician in attendance in less time than could the old family physician, when he was a young man, attend their fathers. The forlornness of these communities is, in many instances, considerably exaggerated through sentiment. The fact that the country store which at one time prospered at the cross-roads, has disappeared, has been accepted as a normal evidence of development. The farmers, with their automobiles, prefer to do their shopping in the larger centers, and are justified in doing so. Likewise, when they are in need of medical service, not emergency in character, they also prefer to seek such service in larger cities, and are capable of doing so with the aid of the automobile. Thus the physician living in the rural district is overlooked and the more lucrative practice is carried to the city, or the city, or the city physician is induced to come out, which he willingly does when the roads are passable; and the high regard which the community feels for his local physician never comes to the surface until he, responding to the pressure of conditions, decides to take up his residence in a larger center.
That physicians would be willing to live in rural districts, providing they could do so and effectively keep the wolf from the door, is manifested by the fact that within the last month thirty-eight physicians have written to this office asking for a list of rural communities in need of physicians. Unfortunately we had at our disposal only four places where the County Medical Societies thought physicians might be able to develop a practice warranting their taking up the location.
J.S.L. (NY State J Med 1025; 25:38