Next, therefore, to God, in all our extremities (_for of the Most High cometh healing_, Eccles. XXXVIII, 2) we must seek to, and rely upon, the Physician, who is the _Manus Dei_ (the Hand of God), said Hierophilus, and to whom He hath given knowledge, that he might be glorified in his wondrous works. Each medical practitioner in his own circle, and to the extent of his medical competence, is a medical officer of health, having more influence in directing and controlling the habits, occupation, the housing, the social customs, the dietary and general mode of life of the families to which he has access, than any other person. It must be added that in most instances he has even more influence than the minister of religion in regulating the ethical conduct of his patients, especially as regards alcoholism and sexual vices. In the United States the federal government has relieved the medical profession from their duty of restricting individual alcoholic consumption, and an experiment has been begun which if continued—and I trust nothing will prevent this—must forthwith reduce the income of practising physicians throughout the American continent, and at the same time do more to diminish crime, accidents and sickness and to increase national efficiency than any other single step that could be taken, with one exception. This would consist in the universal raising of the standard of sexual conduct of men to that which they expect from their future wives, thus securing a rapid reduction and early disappearance of gonorrhoea and syphilis, diseases which rank with pneumonia, tuberculosis and cancer as chief among the captains of death and disablement in our midst. The growing possibilities of improvement in personal and social welfare depend very largely on the extent to which, as I have put it elsewhere, “each practitioner becomes a medical officer of health in the range of his own practice.” Even on their present record, if—at least on one side—the Kingdom of God consists in “the union of all who love in the service of all who suffer,” medical men can proudly and yet humbly take their place as essential agents in the daily fulfilment of the daily prayer, “Thy Kingdom come.” It is perhaps desirable to attempt at this stage a definition of the sense in which I employ the term socialization of medicine. In it I would include the rendering available for every member of the community, irrespective of any necessary relation to the ordinary conditions of individual payment, of all the potentialities of preventive and curative medicine. Within the scope of medicine are included the basic sciences of physiology and pathology; and the instruction and training of every child and young person in elementary hygiene, including dietetics, necessarily come also within the range of our subject.