PEDIATRICS Vol. 47 No. 2 February 1971, pp. 339-351
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THE PEDIATRICIAN AND THE SPECIES: SOME IMPLICATIONS OF OUR ACHIEVEMENTS

Wolf W. Zuelzer M.D.1

1 Child Research Center of Michigan Children's Hospital of Michigan, and Wayne State University School of Medicine, Detroit, Michigan

I am deeply grateful to Dean Smart, Professor Court, Dr. Walker, and the other members of the Department of Child Health for the honor of this invitation,* but I cannot help wondering whether I would have had the courage to accept it if I had known beforehand what the Jacobson Lecture entails. It is one thing to address a gathering of professional colleagues on some innocuous subject of a strictly technical nature, but an altogether different thing to face members of every faculty of this University with a talk supposed to be of general interest. The physician is rarely called upon to leave the comfortable regions of shop talk for the wide open spaces of public debate, nor, broadly speaking, is he eager to venture into such dangerous territory where he might be blown about by the winds of controversy.

PROFESSIONAL INSULARITY

The reasons for this reticence are not hard to find. For one thing, we don't like being contradicted, least of all by laymen. Regrettably, the aura of mystery which from time immemorial has served us as a protective cloak has been dispelled by an enlightened public, and our social prestige has suffered somewhat from the levelling forces of the democratic age. Still, the doctor remains the arbiter of life and death and as such speaks with the voice of authority. His experience at the bedside and in his office conditions him to expect acquiescence, and he is prone to transfer this expectation from his patients to the public at large and to be surprised and hurt when it is disappointed.

Submitted on August 24, 1970
Accepted on October 13, 1970