To the Editor of The Times.
Sir, It has been recently reported in the Press that the Food Controller has decided to allow the purchase of “white” bread to those who find bread of the official standard indigestible or harmful to health, and who can furnish a medical certificate in corroboration of their view. May I call attention to the difficulties which must arise from this decision — difficulties which appear to me to make the situation impossible? The first result has been, to judge from my experience, that medical men are being inundated with requests for certificates. How is the unfortunate doctor to deal with these, often peremptory, requests? Is he to refuse them all and offend his patients, or to grant them all and offend his conscience? For there is no possible middle course. Either “war” bread is difficult of digestion and harmful to health, or it is not. If it is in some degree harmful I cannot take the responsibility of refusing in the case of one sick person while acceding in that of another. And as for the sick, so for the delicate, and so for the children whose anxious parents fear that their future health may be jeopardized. In so far as I have been able to judge, the ill-effects are trifling and utterly insufficient to justify the wholesale upset of a Regulation which has been made, we are told, on grounds of stern necessity as an alternative to a possible national shortage of food. But a section of the public appears to be developing the view that most of its ailments arise from its altered dietary. I have recently been assured that cases of the epidemic diarrhoea so common at this season, and others of spots evidently caused by mosquito bites, were certainly the result of war bread! Unless the whole matter of the imposition of a standard is an unnecessary farce, the civilian population must surely bear such inconvenience as results from it. And it would seem wiser for the authorities to devote their energies to appease unnecessary anxiety while ensuring that the flour milled is uniformly of proper standard and that the bread is skilfully prepared. They appear rather, by their recent action, to be sheltering from baseless clamour by shifting responsibility to the medical profession, a body which has neither time nor the authority to carry out war regulations.
Yours faithfully, MD.
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JULY 17, 1917