In the profession of medicine, I admit, personal influence and directing intelligence subtly interlace. The Negro doctor’s social position makes him specially accessible to Negroes in cases of need. As a friend of the family or of the family’s friends, the doctor is not dreaded as a feelingless stranger with a terrible knife. Moreover, the Negro doctor does not feel himself a man of alien blood come to tend an inferior. Social position and understanding sympathy, then, render the Negro doctor readily accessible and very useful. Moreover, the Negro’s physical condition offers the doctor large opportunities for noble service. In a book upon “Ethnic Factors in the Population of Boston,” Doctor Bushee says, “In Boston the mortality of the Negro is much larger than that of any other ethnic factor”; again, “A high death rate, instead of a low birthrate is causing the Negroes to disappear”; and the statistics are not much more encouraging in many other urban communities North and South. That relatively low economic position is a powerful factor in producing this alarming death rate, I have already suggested; another capital factor is pitiable ignorance of the rudiments of personal hygiene and of sanitation. Negro doctors may without much trouble diffuse throughout a community these rudiments of knowledge and in so doing will prove themselves public servants. North and South the conspicuous financial success and substantial social service of hundreds of Negro doctors eloquently establish the correctness of this view; and of practising physicians, the Negro people to-day have unmistakably too few.