Often the influence of this false standard is more insidious and disastrous. I was discussing the matter the other day with an internationally known scientist. He was at one time—but is no longer—a professor in one of our leading universities. He said that when his first child was born he was getting a salary of $2500 a year. The leading obstetrician in the town charged $500 for a “baby case”—one-fifth of my friend’s annual income. When the financial situation was explained the doctor told him that his assistant was just as able a medical man as himself and would charge only $100, and that he himself would be on the telephone ready to come in a moment if anything went wrong. My friend, after[Pg 42] wrestling in his mind for some time, decided to have the assistant, but he told me that he hoped never again to go through such hell as he endured during the hours of birth, when he thought that if anything went wrong with his wife he would feel all his life that he had sacrificed her for the four hundred dollars’ difference. Yet I consider that this man has the sanest and most balanced mind of all the men I know. The situation outlined is a very real and, both financially and psychologically, a serious one. When anyone we love is ill we feel impelled to have the best attention for him, a half-dozen specialists if necessary; and the standard of the best, more subtly than we realize, is the cost standard. We have become hypersensitive, and this sensitiveness is terrifically costly. I myself was born in New York of a well-to-do family. My mother’s father was rich as things then went. Yet it could not have cost at most $100 to bring me into the world. There were no graduate nurses, no maternity hospitals, few, if any, specialists. The ordinary family physician, at $2 a house visit, and two women such as we call practical nurses did everything, in the home. To-day, what with doctors, nurses, and the hospital charge, the cost would run to about $1500 for a family of the same social grade, or fifteen times the old cost, whereas the ordinary income has less than trebled. III