FURTHER COMMENTS

¹ Harvard University School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts

This is Dr. Wilson's wisdom, and–better still–the Wilson touch. It is this touch which is the essence of pediatrics and few could express it as simply and clearly as Dr. Wilson.

From the vantage point of one who has spent most of his career dealing with issues on a community basis, I would like to add a few reactions.

The first is the slightly sad reflection that part of this learning experience was hidden from Dr. Wilson until he had left Academia and research. It is not as if the kind of role which the public health nurse later filled with Dr. Wilson, the practitioner, did not exist 30 years ago. Public health nurses have performed this role for many years. Unfortunately, their contribution to child health care was excluded–perhaps even downgraded and scorned–by many of the hospital-trained and biomedically oriented professors of the times and by the generation of practitioners who were exposed to the models of their preceptors. I can remember the early impression of Dr. Wilson's humane perfectionism upon me very well. He approached children and families with the same innate understanding of the psychosocial aspects of health and disease that graces his words today. But would he have considered delegating responsibility, or working as a "team member," to formulate a joint plan in the past? In fact, I believe he once expressed himself against the whole concept of "team care" as divisory of patient care responsibility.

The other reaction is to reinforce Dr. Wilson's emphasis on the contribution of the nurse to the quality of patient care rather than to increasing the numbers of patients seen.

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