ILLNESS

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Twice during this academic year we have asked Radcliffe physicians to visit sick students who felt unable to go to the infirmary. Both times the doctors have refused to come.

As graduate students at Radcliffe, we pay $56.50 a year in health fees. For this considerable--and obligatory--fee (more than most of us would pay normally for medical care in a year), we have, we think, a right to expect from the Health Service at least the care we would get from a private physician. To us, this includes the right to have a doctor come to our bedside when we are in pain. Radcliffe does not agree. "Except," (and here we quote a physician at Stillman Infirmary) "except in cases of impending death," Health Center physicians do not make house calls. This seems to us barbarous and miserly.

On weekends, there is no doctor at the Radcliffe Health Center. Cases are referred to Stillman. The one doctor on duty there is not permitted to leave. There is, it is true, a doctor on call, as well: but when we called recently that doctor was "thirty minutes out of town;" and in an emergency, he would evidently be useless.

. . .No Radcliffe dormitory, graduate or undergraduate, has a resident doctor. It is our firm belief that a doctor should be on call to make house visits, or, if this is not to be our privilege, we should not be forced to pay $56.50 to be told to pack up our things, grit our teeth, and march off to Stillman. If this is Radcliffe's version of socialized medicine, we would prefer to get our money back and call our own doctors, who would, we hope, come when we needed them. In the last analysis, it is the inhumanity of the present system to which we object most strongly. Helen Hennessy 2G, House President for 77 Brattle Street