At the last Hearing in the New York Legislature on a “doctors only” bill, the Birth Control Review reports Mrs. Sanger as saying that “the Clinical Research Department of the American Birth Control League teaches methods so simple that once learned any mother who is intelligent enough to keep a nursing bottle clean can use them.” Dr. Robert L. Dickinson, head of the New York Committee on Maternal Health has said that the method most favorably regarded does not require the instruction of a physician preceding its use. “The New Generation,” one of the two outstanding birth control periodicals in England, and official organ of the Neo-Malthusian group of birth control advocates, published in January, 1925, the following editorial against the “doctors only” position. MEDICAL MONOPOLY We deeply sympathize with our American friends in their difficulties with the Comstock Act, but we fear that Mrs. Sanger’s proposed compromise—to give the doctors a monopoly of knowledge—would only be a step from the frying pan into the fire. Mrs. Sanger thinks that contraception must in any case be a subject for medical experts, so it does not matter much whether they have a monopoly or not. There we differ from her. We cannot admit that contraception must necessarily be a medical question. We admit that the kind of contraceptive most fashionable at present has to be fitted by a doctor or nurse, but science may easily evolve a better one which will render doctors and nurses entirely needless. The results of eighteen months’ experiment in Mrs. Sanger’s own clinic are the best proof of this. One of the most successful devices employed there was a —— paste which needs no doctor to fit it. Its percentage of failure was as small as that of any other tried method. From the standpoint of the public it is devoutly to be hoped that some simple method which needs no doctors will turn out to be the best. But such a result would be directly opposed to the interests of the medical profession. If the doctors had a legal monopoly of knowledge, they would be under the strongest temptation to develop and improve those methods which demand the assistance of doctors, and to discourage all research which would make doctors unnecessary. The official stand of the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, in England is also against the “doctors only” position. This is the Society of which Dr. Marie C. Stopes, founder of the first English birth control clinic, is the president.