Medicine in U.S. Capitalist Society

(Quote of the Week)

Writing in the mid 20th century, James P. Cannon, founder of American Trotskyism, pointed to the contradiction besetting doctors in the capitalist U.S. between the delivery of medicine as a social service and its rendering into a commodity for profit. As he observed elsewhere in the same article: “Socialism will be good medicine for the doctors who just want to be doctors.”

Medicine as a science is progressive and revolutionary, constantly sharpening its theoretical tools, bold and thoroughgoing in its increasingly successful search for new techniques. Medical science is benign, by its very nature social-minded, humane and out-giving, committed to the most ennobling ideal—the service of others. Who can be more deserving of the grateful acclaim of the people than those who heal the sick and make human life more livable? The doctors—as doctors—belong to the Order of the Friends of Man.

But the way things are, the doctor, who shouldn’t have to bother with anything but his profession, must also be a businessman who has to make a living, charge all the traffic will bear and try to get rich in competition with others. This side of the picture is not so attractive. Medicine as a business, self-centeredly working for its own pocket, is no better than any other business. In some respects it is even worse, for the unnatural mixing up of a profession designed for service with the business of making money entails a special corruption of its own, which merits nobody’s veneration.

Commercialized medicine leads to discrimination against those who need medical service most in favor of those who can pay best....

The Oath of Hippocrates obligates the doctor to visit the sick wherever they may be and to serve anyone whatever, on the sole condition that he needs medical care.

That ideal of the legendary founder of the medical profession must govern its future too. But that can be fully realized only when the practice of medicine as a social service—its justification and its glory—is completely separated from sordid business considerations and shabby politics—its degradation and disgrace.

That will require a change and reorganization of our social system, as revolutionary as any changes that have been made in the practice of medicine.

—James P. Cannon, “The Doctor’s Dilemma,” Militant, June 1952, reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator (1958)