Self-laudation continues this hold of the medical profession upon the lay imagination. One physician may challenge another's faults, ridicule his remedies, call his antitoxin dangerous poison, but their common profession he proudly styles "the most exalted form of altruism." Young men and women beginning the study or the practice of medicine are exhorted to continue its traditions of self-denial, and in their very souls to place human welfare before personal or pecuniary advancement. Newspapers repeat exhortation and laudation. We laymen pass on the story that we know is not universally true,--physicians know, physicians apply what they know without consciousness of error, physicians must be implicitly trusted. For a physician to give poison when he means to give food is worse, not better, than for a layman to make the same mistake. Neither the moral code nor the law of self-preservation enjoins a tuberculous mother to take alcohol or to sleep in an unventilated room, even if an uninformed physician prescribes it. Instruction in physiology and hygiene would be futile if those who are educated as to the elementary facts of hygiene and physiology must blindly follow blind physicians. A family doctor who gives cod-liver oil for anaemia due to adenoids may do a child as much harm as a nurse who drugs the baby to make it sleep. The physician who refuses to tell the board of health when smallpox or typhoid fever first breaks out takes human life just as truly as if he tore up the tracks in front of an express train. This is another way of saying that parents and teachers must fit themselves to know whether the family physician and their community's physicians are efficient practitioners and teachers. Every one can learn enough about the preventable causes of sickness and depleted vitality to insist upon the ounce of education and prevention that is better than a pound of cure. For its sins of omission, as for its sins of commission, the medical profession shares responsibility with laymen. For years leading educators, business men, hospital directors, public officials, have known that communicable diseases could be stamped out. The methods have been demonstrated. There is absolutely no excuse to-day for epidemics of typhoid in Trenton, Pittsburg, or Scranton, for epidemics of scarlet fever in the small towns of Minnesota, for uninterrupted epidemics of tuberculosis everywhere. Had either laymen, physicians, or school-teachers made proper use of the knowledge that has been in text-books for a generation, this country would be saving thousands of lives and millions of dollars every year. Our _doing_ and _getting done_ have lagged behind our _knowing_.