With regard to all of these things clergymen may do a great humanitarian work by protecting the poor from the efforts of advertising remedy-makers to get their hard-earned money. It is sometimes said that long years have been spent in the preparation of a remedy. This not only is never true, but never has been true in the history of proprietary medicines. Some one who has an eye to business gets hold of a prescription of which he knows nothing, but of which his advertising agents are able to say much, and the result is sometimes a fortune for the advertiser. There is always a pretence of philanthropy, but it is the mask of heartless hypocrisy. Unfortunately many of our religious journals are tempted by the promptly paid bills of such manufacturing concerns to print their advertisements. They are aiding in a {103} deliberate swindle, and if this were better understood there would be much less suffering and fewer vain hopes. The best-managed newspapers and magazines in the country are now absolutely refusing all medical advertisements. This is the only proper attitude in the matter, for there is a place to advertise medicines, if they are worthy, and that place is the medical journals. If the popular advertising could be reduced, we should soon have much less of the proprietary medicine evil. There are many ways in which clergymen by their example, their advice, and their influence can be of great assistance to practitioners of medicine. It is very sad, then, to find that some of them, having elabourated theories of their own on certain subjects, or having taken up with peculiar notions, are in opposition to the accepted medical teaching of the world. Occasionally they are found among the ranks of the anti-vaccinationists, though if there is anything that has been demonstrated to a certainty, it is that vaccination has practically eradicated smallpox, considering the frequency of the disease a century ago, and that it would absolutely eradicate it, if the practice could be made universal. Statistics are at hand to demonstrate this beyond all possibility of doubt. There are a certain number of people, however, who apparently, out of a desire for singularity as much as anything else, refuse to accept the evidence. It is very unfortunate to find clergymen among them, for it tends to bring the clerical judgment into disrepute.