Medical Philosophy
Spence always laid stress on the inclusion of the home as well as the hospital in the care of the sick child and throughout his teaching emphasised the preventive as well as the curative aspect of paediatrics. Spence combined clinical skills with great sensitivity as a doctor and his whimsical charm made him a most attractive personality. As a teacher and leader, he was outstanding and wrote: 'The first aim of my department is comradeship, not achievement.' His own achievements were of course great, and for his services to British medicine and medical education, he was knighted in 1950. He summed up the practice of medicine as follows:
The real work of a doctor is not an affair of health centres, or laboratories, or hospital beds. Techniques have their place in medicine, but they are not medicine. The essential unit of medical practice is the occasion when, in the intimacy of the consulting room or sick room, a person who is ill, or believes himself to be ill, seeks the advice of a doctor whom he trusts. This is a consultation, and all else in the practice of medicine derives from it.
The Yellow Brick Road Children's Medical Research Centre at the Royal Victoria Infirmary is officially dedicated to Sir James Spence. The cost of £5 million was raised entirely from people in the North East of England in less than four years by the North-East Charity, the Children's Foundation.
Read more about this topic: James Calvert Spence
Famous quotes containing the words medical and/or philosophy:
“As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“A life-worshipper’s philosophy is comprehensive.... He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death ... and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)