The patient who cannot afford the bus fare to the clinic

Abstract

In his book Equanimitas, written in 1904, Sir William Osler laments that very few doctors go into public life to help advise and manage the delivery of health care. “As a rule,” he says “doctors make bad citizens taking little or no interest in civic, state or national politics”. Most of us do not like leaving the comfort zone of clinical medicine and entering the more robust arena of medical politics.