were brought against the proposal as are now advanced against the
notification of venereal disease. Sir W. Foster, member for Ilkeston,
and a medical man of standing, speaking in the House of Commons in the
debate on the Infectious Diseases Notification Bill, on the 31st July,
1889, said,

"The Bill calls upon medical men to perform something more than the
ordinary duties of citizenship by requiring them to become informers of
the occurrence of diseases. The relation of a medical men to his patient
ought to be one of complete confidence, and anything that comes to the
knowledge of a medical man in the practice of his profession is
practically an inviolable secret; and I do not like any Bill to
interfere with that relationship. I know myself that one of the results
of this Bill, if passed into law, will be that in scores of cases
medical men will not be called in to attend people suffering from
infectious diseases ... I admit the difficulty of the position, but I am
anxious that no measure should pass into law which will induce the
public to keep these diseases more secret than they have been in the
past, with the risk of adding to the spreading of them. We must be very
cautious not to do anything which will prevent the public from placing
full and implicit confidence in their medical man. I can quite conceive
it to be possible that, if an outbreak of infectious disease occurs in a
populous part of London, the people may, in order to prevent exposure,
refuse to allow a medical man to come in, and in such cases we shall
have tenfold more difficulty than at present. Therefore, while I am
anxious to promote the notification of disease, I do not want the
Government to promote rebellion on the part of the public."

Needless to say, these gloomy anticipations have not been realized.
Probably the more enlightened generations to succeed us will wonder how
there could ever have been any opposition to the notification of
venereal disease, just as we to-day read Sir W. Foster's words and
marvel that any person of intelligence could have committed himself to
such statements.

Notification of infectious diseases and isolation of patients suffering
from such diseases have for many years been compulsory. Isolation, when
spoken of by opponents to a similar measure for venereal diseases, is
opprobriously described as "compulsory detention." For twenty years it
has been the law in New Zealand that an authorized medical practitioner
m