How humiliating to the conscientiously equipped doctor to hear people say of a man who never had more brains than he needed, and had hopelessly muddled what he had by using his own dope and stimulants: "I tell you Doc Booze is the best doctor in town yet when he's half sober!" Strange, isn't it, that in many communities people have an idea that an inclination on the part of a physician toward whisky or dope indicates some peculiar mental fitness for a doctor? "Poor fellow, he formed the habit of taking stimulants to keep up when he had to go night and day during the big typhoid epidemic, you know." For what per cent. of cases of medical dipsomaniacs this constitutes a stock excuse, only medical men know. As an Osteopathic physician I was never rushed so that I felt the necessity for "keeping up on stimulants." If I had been, to be consistent, I should have had to stimulate (?) mechanically, of course. Not only do shysters and pretenders abuse the confidence of the masses in matters of diagnosis and medication, but of late years they are working another species of graft that is beginning to react against the profession. This graft consists in the over-use of therapeutic appliances that are all right in their place when legitimately used. By what standard is the physician judged by the people who enter his office? It used to be the display of medical literature. Sometimes some of it was pseudo-medical literature. Did you ever know a shyster to pad his library with Congressional reports? I have. The literature used to be conspicuously placed in the waiting-room, with a ponderous volume lying open on the desk. Have you a "leading doctor" in your town? Often he is not only in the lead but has flagged all the others at the quarter post--put them all into the "has been" class. What an elegant office he has! Plush rugs and luxurious couches in the waiting-room. Double doors into the private and operating-rooms, left open when not in actual use to give impressive glimpses of glass cases filled with glittering instruments, any one of which would give the lie to Solomon's declaration that "there is nothing new under the sun." An X-ray machine fills a conspicuous corner. In the same room are tanks, tubes, inhalers, hot-air appliances, vibrators, etc. One full side of the room is filled with shelves that groan under a load of the medicines he "keeps and dispenses." What are all of these hundreds of bottles for if it is true, as many of our greatest physicians say, that a comparatively few people are benefited by drugs? These numerous bottles may contain placebos. I do not know as to that, but I do know something of the impression such a display makes on the mind of an intelligent layman. The query in his mind is how much of that entire display is for its legitimate effect on the minds of the patients, and how much of it is to impress the people with the powers of this physician, with his "wonderful equipment" to cope with all manner of disease?