Whither medicine? The expansion of non-doctor practice

It is time for the medical profession to stand up

Some 60 years ago, Lord “Tommy” Horder, the doyen of British physicians of that time, addressed a meeting on the theme “Whither medicine?”.1 He suggested that a visitor from Mars would have found such a question incomprehensible and would have responded, “Why, whither else than straight ahead ...” It was a time when the role of doctors was unambiguous: to care for patients and draw upon their scientific and clinical training to promote the “forging [of] still more weapons with which to conquer disease ...”