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20
APPENDIX B
THE IMPLICATIONS FOR MEDICINE OF THE
HUNTER REPORT
"This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea.
And the hunter home from the hill"
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
These words composed by one of our great literary figures
who was born within a year or two of the appearance of organized
public health on a national scale in this country and who was to
succumb prematurely to the then "captain of the men of death"
and inscribed at his request on his tombstone beneath the starry
skies of the South Pacific, have a special meaning in these very
different times for the medical administrator. The authors of the
Hunter Report do not "claim to write on tablets of stone".
Nonetheless, in spite of the difficulties under which they
laboured in not knowing with any certainty the managerial
structure of the unified health service of the future, the members
of the working party have brought home, I believe, a message of
fundamental importance not only to medical administrators (or
specialists in community medicine, to use the broader designation
favoured by Hunter) but to the medical profession as a whole.
THE SETTING FOR HUNTER
This message must be read against a backcloth far removed
from the insanitary era in which Robert Louis Stevenson lived
and died. Today, nearly a century later, thanks to the great
advance in medical knowledge and the concomitant rise in the
general standard of living and of education, an increasingly
sophisticated industrial urban and ageing population entertains
ever higher expectations in the field of health and welfare. In