Stepmother Dear

I love the clean clinic which washed me with care,

And the nursery-school lady who tooth-combed my hair,

And all the youth movements so toilworn for me,

But mother, God bless her, she never sees me.

This parody of the old tearjerker, Mother Machree, just about expresses one Briton's opinion of socialized medicine. Quoted by the Anglican Bishop of Salisbury, the Rt. Rev. Geoffrey Charles Lester Lunt, it appeared last week in Sarum Messenger, a church publication. With increasing government interest in the individual's health "from sewerage to the new National Health Service," said the bishop, the government has become a sort of "foster mother" for the whole population. Though he likes some things about womb-to-tomb medical care at government expense, he said, it has lessened individual responsibility, and is killing "much that is best in English home life."

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