Less “Professional Etiquette” Please!

There is one respect in which I think the medical profession needs a good overhauling. I refer to some of the conventions that go under the head of professional etiquette.

CAN’T WE HAVE A LITTLE LESS? 

There are certain things for which I deeply admire the members of the medical profession, — their self sacrifice and courage in times of epidemic and the vast amount of charity work they do. There is one respect in which I think the medical profession needs a good overhauling. I refer to some of the conventions that go under the head of professional etiquette.“Why,” says a friend of mine, “do you have such faith in doctors? They aren't always right. They can’t be. And they don’t have to be, either. They don’t have half the incentive men in other jobs have to be right because it’s professional etiquette that one doctor shall not say anything about another doctor’s work. 

“If a lawyer, or an architect, or a manufacturer makes some big mistake people know about it and he gets come up with. So he’s everlastingly careful to make as few mistakes as possible. But if a doctor makes mistakes, all the rest of the profession are supposed to help him cover them up so he will help them when they make mistakes.” Of course that’s putting the ease pretty harshly. But there is some reason for his strong feeling, surely. 

A doctor told me the other day of a patient who was brought to him for his eyes in a frightful condition which at once made him suspect some serious trouble with the ductless glands. “It was against professional etiquette,” he said, “but when I found that the doctor was treating her for some other trouble altogether I felt so badly for the family that I couldn’t help suggesting they get a specialist on glands.” They got such a specialist and the boy who had been on the verge of idiocy was restored to normality. “Most doctors,” he said, “wouldn’t have done that because it was against professional etiquette.” In other words, professional etiquette would have bade them see the child become an idiot rather than interfere. 

In the story of hospital life by an author who has good reason to know whereof she writes, the hospital staff stand by and sec a child in the hospital slowly dying for lack of an operation just because he is the patient of an old school doctor who does not believe in that operation and it is not their place, in spite of all their knowledge of modern methods, to urge it. In the story, an accident makes the doctor realize his mistake and the child is saved by the operation. 

Professional etiquette used to forbid any doctor to tell his women patients the terrible why of some of their unnecessary suffering and individualism, I am thankful to say, there is a swing away from that convention. In these days the very poor and the very rich get the best medical attention because the very poor are given it free at clinics and public hospitals where the greatest men in their profession give their time; and the very rich can pay for it. 

But I have heard it stated on good authority that the verv poor are more fortunate than the very rich. Why? Because the fact that the rich can pay so much makes doctors careful about trespassing on each other’s territory. More professional etiquette and, for once, it is the rich who suffer. Of course, professional etiquette has many usages. Without it we shall doubtless have many evils that it prevents. But it does seem to me that if it were somewhat modified the public would be better off. — From “Ruth Cameron’s Side Talks,” The Riverside Daily Press, 1922

 🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor of the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia