Harley Street Forever

In the eyes of the average Briton, London's Harley Street far outranks any temple of Aesculapius as a shrine of healing. But last week Harley Street was shocked through its whole six-block length by a rude noise: "Some of the greatest consultants in the land do work in Harley Street," declared Neurologist Richard Alan John Asher, "but so do some of the greatest scoundrels."

Dr. Asher's blast was in the August Family Doctor, published by the British Medical Association. When London's medicos began to move to Harley Street in the 1880s (from Savile Row), each leading practitioner usually leased an entire house and lived over his consulting rooms. Today only a handful of top-drawer consultants--as the British prefer to call their specialists--can afford a whole house. (Dr. Asher himself occupies such a house in Wimpole Street, which parallels Harley in direction and character.) Result is most Harley doctors lease a suite of rooms.

Brazen Doors. Most Harley houses are owned by the estate of Lord Howard de Walden, whose agents are careful to lease them only to physicians of high repute. Other landlords have been less scrupulous. A dozen buildings have been carved into warrens of one-room offices." and these are shared by so many doctors that they have become little more than mail drops for fee-hungry physicians who know the value of a Harley Street address. A single doorway may be almost solidly covered with as many as 40 brass name plates. Some names stand for reputable young consultants who are on the way up; far too many, says Asher, stand for phony "consultoids" and for outright charlatans and quacks.

When Britain launched its womb-to-tomb National Health Service in 1948, it was expected to be the death of Harley Street. But many Britons did not like N.H.S., decided to join private health-insurance plans corresponding to Blue Cross and Blue Shield in the U.S. With a major part of their costs covered by insurance, they can afford to run to Harley Street at the first twinge of pain. paying private (and sometimes exorbitant) fees for the privilege.

Golden Fees. Far from languishing, Harley Street is flourishing as never before. Its curbs are chronically jammed with double-parked cars both big and little--the big ones usually owned by the doctors, the little ones by their patients. Some Harley Streeters haul in as much as $150,000 a year from private fees, N.H.S. fees as hospital consultants, and government-paid "merit money" for doctors with special skills and experience. Most make $15,000 to $25,000.

To avoid Harley's "scoundrels," Dr. Asher advises patients to be guided by their own family doctors in seeking specialists. But, as he admits, some family doctors pick specialists for their patients on the strength of a Harley Street name plate. It all seems to prove the truth of the deathbed line attributed in 1884 to Playwright Henry James Byron (no kin to the poet): "Everything has an end, except Harley Street."

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