“ fills me with a spirit of hope & confidence, that reacts continually against the disease & which will finally cure the eye.” It didn’t, of course. “I suffered according to a grand & beautiful law, that the highest must suffer for the sins of the lowest,” Elizabeth observed. As a medical resident in Paris, she witnessed the ravages of syphilis and even contracted an aggressive form of conjunctivitis from the newborn child of a woman infected with gonorrhea. Venereal disease was, in her opinion, divine punishment for promiscuity. She often conflated virtue with health - and immorality with illness. Explaining why so many Irish refugees arrived in the US infected with typhus - after spending weeks crammed together on ships crawling with lice, the actual disease vector - she hypothesized that “without employment or exercise, their minds had time to brood over the fearful scenes they had left … & the seeds of disease sown in their constitutions were thus nourished into life.” Like many doctors of her day, she believed fear predisposed people to illness. Just as she disdained women for what she saw as their inherent weakness, she scorned sick people for the moral weakness she believed was the root of disease. But as a rule, she had little sympathy for the sick. So if the government addressed these things seriously, I think it will be able to reverse the brain drain and it will become brain gain.Seeing her father suffer may have sparked Elizabeth’s interest in medicine. 'The health sector is poorly funded, personnel are poorly paid, equipment are not available for us to work. 'Government needs to first of all put their money where their mouth is,' Amodu said. Enema Amodu, a secretary general of the Otoneurological Society of Nigeria, told DW that the government should focus on improving poor working conditions to prevent doctors from leaving. Williams added that legislating against doctors' movement would violate their human rights.ĭr. Ayoola Williams, a consultant physician and cardiologist at Abuja's Wuse District Hospital. ' Why are they allowing their own children to go abroad why are they themselves going abroad for medical treatment and all this? Are they not public servants?' asked Dr. Many doctors in Nigeria call the proposed law discriminatory and an infringement on the rights of their newly qualified colleagues. 'Who is he leaving the country for? He is supposed to be in the country to salvage his people no matter the situation.' 'I see no reason why a doctor after graduating in Nigeria will leave Nigeria and go outside the country,' he said.

Nigerian Senator Danjuma Laah says he sympathizes with the doctors however, he feels that they have a moral obligation to remain in Nigeria.

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video But what about the doctors' freedom of movement? A virtual midwife helps fight infant mortality

The doctors blackwell