Health > Intergovernmental conference of Far-Eastern countries on rural hygiene : preparatory papers : report of French Indo-China

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from the milder complaints to obtain treatment which we should
be unable to give them and which we could never provide
without increasing the cost of medical provision to a figure
out of keeping with the country’s budgetary resources.
The lightening of the task of the public services through
the intelligent use of traditional medical systems makes it
possible to equip the country with the hospitals and dispensaries
capable of providing the complicated treatment required by the
serious illnesses for which the natives have recourse to us. Such
is the raison d’etre of the hospitals, the equipment of which is
being constantly improved with a view to the highest possible
degree of technical efficiency. By thus limiting their curative
activities to forms of treatment which are beyond the resources
of the traditional systems of medicine, the health services are
able to devote a greater part of their attention and funds to
prophylaxis and preventive medicine.
2. Staff.
(a) Doctors.
The medical and public health services are staffed by European
and native doctors differing in both origin and training.
The European doctors, of whom there are in all no (actually
at their posts), belong, in the main, to the civilian staff of the
Medical Service and are recruited by competitive examination.
Some twenty posts are held by doctors of the Colonial Army
Medical Corps, who are seconded for service under the civil
authorities. In the less densely populated frontier districts,
certain Army doctors take charge of the Medical Service for
the native population in addition to their military duties.
There are a few civilian doctors, mostly specialists, who are
put in charge of services in certain central hospitals, under
contract or on a fixed allowance. The figure of no European
doctors given above does not include the members of the teaching
staff of the Higher School of Medicine, consisting of full professors
and lecturers whose hospital classes at Hanoi are given in
the hospitals of the Medical Service, in the running of which
they thus play a preponderant part.