ABSTRACT
The emergence of the general practitioner as a personal physician is reflected in nineteenth-century literature, in the figure of the country doctor so sympathetically portrayed by H. de Balzac, George Eliot, A. Chekhov and other writers of the humanist school. With the proliferation of medical specialties and hospital departments, the general practitioner came to be regarded more and more as a sort of poor cousin, the colleague who had failed to climb the rungs of the careers ladder. The general practitioner in a modern urban society has to operate in some form of organizational framework, and group medical practice within a health-care team seems the appropriate solution. Psychosocial stress and adverse life circumstances are also recognized as major provoking causes of psychiatric illness. A representative sample can be drawn and the way opened to finding undeclared cases of illness, but the investigator is quite dependent on the public readiness to co-operate.
