Doctors respond to ‘intemperate’ criticism of BMA and turn attack on Government

Many Jewish doctors were appalled to read your intemperate so-called history (

The author’s unwarranted accusations against the BMA fall into three categories — antisemitism, anti-NHS, and indifference to patient’s interests.

At least 10 practising Jews have held the highest offices within the BMA. Furthermore, the BMA has never registered doctors — that is done by the GMC. In 1938, no German qualifications were recognised. In 1939, the then chairman of the BMA, Henry Souter, ensured that 300 German and Austrian doctors were given crash courses to qualify in Britain.

In 1929, the concept of the National Health Service came not from politicians but from the BMA. It did not oppose the 1946 NHS Act, it opposed the power to make doctors civil servants responsible to their employer and not their patients. In April 1948, Bevan relented and the BMA recommended acceptance. The mouths he “stuffed with gold” were consultants at the voluntary hospitals who, having given their services unpaid for centuries, were to be paid.

Politicians make unrealistic promises. People became doctors to provide the highest standards of care possible, but are aware that any action against the state may harm patients. That has been ruthlessly exploited by governments. Junior doctors see money wasted on a huge bureaucracy, incompetent managers moved sideways, wards shutting, and their training, on which future patients depend, vanishing through excessive workload. The Government refuses compulsory arbitration because it might lose. Dr John Marks Chairman of Council British Medical Association 1984 – 1990

Monica Porter’s diatribe against the NHS junior doctors was distinguished for its irrelevance and inaccuracy. We support the junior doctors because we know that they are already providing a seven-day hospital service, which stretches them to breaking-point, and the official policy of increased provision with fewer resources threatens patient safety.

The “Seven-day NHS” slogan rings hollow when one realises that hospital pharmacists, radiologists and haematologists are not being targeted in the same fashion.

The “closed shop” of the BMA in the 1930s cannot seriously be invoked as a smear on professional integrity some 80 years on — and, as it happens, it was the junior doctors of the 1940s, many of whom had spent the war years in the Royal Army Medical Corps, who were the most enthusiastic supporters of the NHS when it was introduced in 1948. We David Lawrence [Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health] and Dr Anne Summers