There is a constant excess of sickness among the poor as compared with the well-to-do. Measures for the relief of poverty, therefore, may be regarded as within the scope of the physician’s prescription. This may be accomplished for the moment by monetary or material help; but unless the causes of poverty are sought out and counteracted, the assistance given is merely palliative. For nothing is more certain than that poverty tends to become a self-perpetuating condition. Thus poverty leads to premature employment of children, with detriment to their normal growth, followed by diminished efficiency in adult life. This implies low wages throughout life, and so poverty is passed on to a second generation. Evidently timely assistance to induce the parent to delay employing the boy, until he has been prepared for work, and to ensure his being put to work which will not be a “blind-alley” occupation, might have obviated the evil chain of events. Poverty again when carried to the point of destitution may tempt to larceny; this may be followed by loss of employment, and so the temporary unrelieved poverty is liable to become permanent. Intemperance has been almost wiped out as a cause of disease in the United States; and we have in the fact that the whole country has “gone dry” a remarkable example of a “short-cut” towards social salvation from alcoholism which will be most instructive. Apart from such universal prohibition of alcoholic beverages, the physician has to think of an alcoholic patient under his care as the possible victim of one or more or all of several coöperating influences conducing to intemperance. The alcoholic habit may have been gradually acquired as the result of protracted social indulgence in moderation acting on a person of unstable mental constitution; it may, especially in wage-earners, have been hastened by the evil custom of treating. It not infrequently follows overwork, with the associated feeling of need for stimulants; it accompanies bad housing, with unsatisfactory sleeping accommodation; and it is aided by poor and badly cooked food, due to shiftlessness, overwork, or lack of domestic training of the man’s wife. If there is to be successful control of alcoholism, action in all the directions briefly indicated above, and in other directions which will suggest themselves, is necessary; and although the physician cannot himself do all this, his efforts should run parallel with social efforts in these directions. Even when the “short-cut” of compulsory abstinence has been taken, the efforts indicated above are still needed; for alcoholism is not the only resultant of bad social habits, of overwork, of unsatisfactory feeding, of deficient sleep, and so on.