During this period of his connection with the hospital, in 1851, the smallpox broke out in Bangkok. Dr. House sent to Singapore for vaccine virus and at once began vaccinating any child whose parents he could induce to submit. For weeks he roamed about the city in his free hours soliciting patients for vaccination, explaining, entreating, warning, and almost hiring parents to permit him to inoculate their children. As one reads through the daily entries of the journal at this time, he receives an odd impression of this foreign doctor going about the city begging permission to administer an ounce of prevention. Back of this he had two very earnest desires. The first and immediate purpose, of course, was to save life and to prevent the dire results of the disease, evidences of which he saw everywhere. But the deeper motive was, by the demonstrated advantage of vaccination, to induce confidence in Western sciences in general and in the good motives of the missionaries in particular, so that the people would be ready to give more serious attention to the gospel message. After eighteen months of this arrangement, Dr. Lane took charge of the dispensary and Dr. House formally abandoned his profession. During the four and a half years he had a record of seven thousand three hundred and two patients. With characteristic unselfishness, however, he consented for a time to substitute when the other physicians could not respond to calls; but soon he found that old patients were taking advantage of this consent by expressing a preference for him, so that the cases were gradually increasing. Finally he took a firm stand and declined to do any professional work, except to assist in surgery. After Dr. House had altogether retired from his profession there appears in his journal a soliloquy which indicates that another motive had been subconsciously urging him to this course which, only after he had some months’ retrospect, had been permitted to come to expression: “April 17, 1853. Is it not my duty to write a full expression of my feeling of my lost confidence in the healing art to the executive committee. I fear my parents would be tried when the faculty cast me off as I do their traditionary notions. Peace with them is better than war, perhaps. And yet perhaps I am doing very wrong by standing in the way of some other medical missionary who would be sent out if I was not believed to be a regular practitioner. “But the last consideration does but little trouble my conscience, believing as I do from the bottom of my heart, that the more medicine given the worse the patient is off; and the less, the better.”