A pathetic letter comes to me from a woman suffering with fistula. Having achieved the morphine habit as the direct and inevitable result of taking pain-killing drugs given to her by her family physician, she now feels herself disgraced. Like many sensitive women who in this or some other way become victims of the drug habit, she is obsessed, as her letter clearly shows, with the conviction that her achievement of the habit has been a personal sin, and that her continued yielding to it puts her beyond the pale of righteousness. She writes that she finds herself incapable of going to her church for Sunday services or to prayer meetings because she feels ashamed when in the imminent presence of her Maker. Another woman, evidently animated by a similar psychological phenomenon, writes that having acquired the drug habit, although blamelessly, since it was through the administration of narcotics by her doctor, she finds it a psychological impossibility to kneel at her bedside and offer that prayer to God which it had been her nightly practice to deliver. I could multiply such instances indefinitely. It is impossible to conceive any episodes more pitiful than the cases of this sort which have been detailed to me by drug victims, doctor-made. That feeling of disgrace, that unjustified conviction of sin on the part of absolutely innocent women victims of the drug habit, is apparently among the most terrible of humanity's psychological experiences. If I had the pen of a Zola and the imagination of a Maupassant, I might properly impress the medical world with a sense of its responsibility in this matter. Without it I fear that I may fail to do so; but could I accomplish only this one thing, I should feel that my life had been of use to that humanity which I desire above all things to serve. No work could be of more importance to the world of sufferers than one which would put the use of these potentially beneficent, but, alas! often injurious, drugs upon a respectable basis, so that the man who must be given the relief which they alone can offer may no more hesitate to tell his neighbor that he is taking morphine than he now will hesitate to tell his neighbor that he is taking blue mass pills or citrate of magnesia. RESPONSIBILITY OF THE TRAINED NURSE