In no other way can the atrocious mistakes that doctors make in prognosis be accounted for. _How many, many times _doctors have declared that a given case must end in death, and they are so cocksure that they are right that they leave the patient to die; some sort of a fake, mountebank or fanatic comes in, the drug disease wears off and in a few days the patient is well. That is exactly the sort of a case Dr. Deaver describes. The faker gets busy with drugs that antidote the morphine poisoning, and occasionally a patient gets well in spite of all. In regard to surgery for this disease I shall quote from Ochsner: "Personally, I can only second the statement made by one of the most experienced men in this country in the surgical treatment of appendicitis, that there are thousands of surgeons who are otherwise competent, i. e., competent to perform the ordinary surgical and gynecological operations, whom he would not think of permitting to open his abdomen in case he personally suffered from an attack of appendicitis. This condition is true not because it is an especially difficult or dangerous operation, but because it requires an appreciation of the conditions upon which success and failure depend, and this appreciation can be obtained only by observing good methods. "In many of the ordinary surgical operations it is not necessary to follow out the details with any great degree of accuracy, because failure to do this will at most result in confining the patient to bed a little longer than usual or necessary, while in the appendicitis operation it is likely to result in the death of the patient. "This position, when taken in the discussion of appendicitis in medical societies, has frequently given rise to severe criticism because upon its face it looks as though appendicitis operations should be performed only by the few who happen to have acquired especial skill in this class of surgery, possibly at the expense of the lives of a number of patients. "This, however, is not the case. The operation is simple enough if one will but take the pains to learn it, and every town of five thousand inhabitants should have at least one man perfectly competent to do such work. But if there is no such man available then I would say most emphatically that the patient's chances of recovery are many times greater with proper non-surgical treatment than with an operation. Of course, patients have occasionally recovered, by accident, in the hands of most incompetent surgeons, but the death rate after appendicitis operations in the hands of incompetent surgeons is absolutely frightful.