Written in 1974 the next few paragraphs uncannily describe the condition in which doctors find themselves today

Prologue to One Man's Medicine

This is a fictionalized memoir about medicine. It is true to the mood of the thirty years it spans, during which medicine and science have abolished or learned to control most of the old scourges, have advanced or regressed, as the case may be, to the stage of genetic tinkering, and, in so doing, have imposed their own unique stresses on society.

As we struggle to attain a higher plane of social organization, the physician becomes increasingly subordinate to organizations, governments, institutions, and men of neither license nor tradition in medicine, who have vaulted into positions of power in the newly created health syndicate; businessmen, lawyers, accountants, car salesmen, bankers and the new breed, the hospital administrator: paper doctors who treat paper. They see to the health of the by-laws, procedure manuals, bills, accounts, debits and insurance forms, beguiled by the delusion that if the records are neat and orderly, institutional care of the patient is neat and orderly.

The doctor, as their hireling, is forced to use the tools and services they provide, which may not be the best available; urged to consider the community as a whole when treating his patient; coerced into violating the confidentiality of the doctor-patient relationship by monitoring the utilization of hospital beds by his colleagues.

Nurses resent being "handmaidens" to the doctor, and strive to become an independent profession.

There is a hue and cry for doctors to divest themselves of the elite position they have held so long in medicine. Who, then, should be the elite?

Clearly the precious bond that exists between a patient and his doctor is being riven by unqualified intruders with unlimited power. The physician, in his spiritual and serving role, may be the commodity that is squandered in this struggle.

The medical profession is increasingly in bondage. Like the point of an inverted pyramid it is being pressed deeper into the ground by the weight of an enlarging, expensive bureaucracy. If the profession of medicine is shattered by this burden, would it be asking too much for Aesculapius to be reborn?