The Commercial Spirit--Commercialism in Medicine--Stock Company Medical Colleges--Graft in Medicines, Drugs and Nostrums--Encyclopedia Graft--"Get-Rich-Quick" Propositions--Paradoxes in Character of Shysters--Money Madness--Professional Failurephobia--The Fortunate Few and the Unfortunate Many--A Cause of Quackery--The Grafter's Herald--The World's Standard--Solitary Confinement--The Prisoner's Dream--Working up a Cough--Situation Appalling Among St. Louis Physicians--A Moral Pointed. This chapter is not written because I possess a hammer that must be used. My liver is sound, and I have a pretty good job. Neither palpation nor "osculation" (as one of our bright Osteopathic students once said in giving means used in physical diagnosis) reveals any "lesion" in my domestic affairs. However, it doesn't take the jaundiced eye of a pessimist to see the graft that abounds to-day. The grafter is abroad in the land like a wolf seeking whom he may devour, and the sheep-skin (sometimes a diploma) that once disguised his wolfish character has become so tattered by much use that it now deceives only the most foolish sheep. Once a sheep-skin of patriotism disguised the politician, and people fancied that a public office was a public trust. The revelations of the last few years have taught us that too often a public office is but a public steal. The commercial spirit dominates the age. Nothing is too sacred for its defiling hands to touch. The church does not escape. Preachers accuse each other of following their Lord for the loaves and fishes. Lawyers accuse each other of taking fees from both sides. Leading physicians unhesitatingly say that commercialism is the bane of the medical profession. They say hundreds are rushing into medicine because they have heard of the large earnings of a few fortunate city physicians, and think they are going into something that will bring them plenty of "easy money." Stock company medical colleges have been organized by men whose main object was to get a share of the money these hosts of would-be doctors had to spend. Even the new systems of therapeutics such as Osteopathy, that have boomed themselves into a kind of popularity, have their schools that, to believe what some of them say of each other, are dominated by the rankest commercialism, being, in fact, nothing but Osteopathic diploma mills.