Now and then such subjects have been proposed for discussion to a group of physicians and moralists, but usually no practical conclusion has been reached because one side did not understand the other. In 1898 there was a series of articles on ectopic gestation in the _American Ecclesiastical Review_, in which moralists like Lehmkuhl, Sabetti, Aertnys, and Holaind, and some of the leading gynaecologists of America considered the questions but arrived at no decision. The physicians did not understand certain questions, other questions were on obsolete medical practice, essential questions were omitted, and from the data the moralists came to opposed conclusions. We find also in moral theologies deductions drawn from false medical sources. Reasons are given, for example, to justify the use of a large quantity of alcoholic liquor at a dose in cases of great pain, typhoid fever, snake-poisoning, and other diseases, in the supposition that such doses will benefit or cure the patient, whereas the physician that would follow that treatment would be guilty of malpractice. There was recently in America a discussion on the relation of öophorectomy to the _impedimentum impotentiae_. One side held that a lack of ovaries constitutes impotence; the other side, that it does not. The discussion was useful because it incidentally gathered the full doctrine of the moralists on this subject, but from the medical point of view there is no connection whatever between these conditions. A small number of books on pastoral medicine have been written by clergymen that were not physicians, and a few German books by physicians that were also moralists. Those by the physicians draw conclusions from antiquated medical practice, or they are mere popular treatises on hygiene; those by the clergymen have some value on the ethical side, but they are incomplete because the authors had not the necessary medical knowledge. The essays offered in this book by no {vii} means cover the entire field of pastoral medicine, but as far as they go we have endeavoured to offer the medical doctrine of the present day on the questions considered, and that as completely as is necessary to draw the moral inferences. Since, then, so many of the questions of pastoral medicine are not defined, physicians are likely to follow the doctrine of the standard medical books, which without exception advise them to take the life of a dangerous foetus almost as unconcernedly as they might prescribe an active drug, or in any case to put utility before justice. There is, therefore, an urgent necessity that competent men fix that shifting part of ethics and moral theology called pastoral medicine, and these essays are presented as a temporary bridge to serve in crossing a corner of the bog until better engineers lay down a permanent causeway.