The medical avenue of approach, then, the plan and hope of establishing intimate relations with a person or a family while we are trying to give them medical assistance, offers incomparable advantages. These advantages become clearer still if we compare them with the special difficulties which arise if one tries to begin an acquaintanceship with financial inquiries or with moral investigations. People who will agree on everything else will quarrel on money matters. There is nothing that so easily leads to friction, suspicion, and unfriendliness, as the interview in which one is trying to make out whether people are speaking the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, in relation to their income and expenditure. This matter very naturally seems to people their own business. They quite naturally resent inquiries on such matters by strangers. They feel attacked and in defence they are apt to conceal or color the truth. And yet, if a friendly relation has first been established through the patient's recognition of our genuine desire to help his physical difficulties, the financial inquiries which make a necessary part of the home visitor's work can much more easily follow. One has to understand what money is available in order to make the best plans for nutrition, for home hygiene, for rest and vacation--all of which naturally form part of our medical interest. I wish to make quite clear here my appreciation that good social workers never begin their relationships with a client by assuming a moral fault on his part and never push the economic questionnaire into the first interview. All I wish to point out is that it is perhaps easier for the medical social worker than for others to avoid these blunders. At the outset of a relationship which aims to be friendly, investigations which start with the assumption that there has been some _moral fault_ or weakness in those whom we wish to help are even worse than financial inquiries. The instant that the social worker finds herself in the position of a moral critic, it becomes next to impossible that a friendly relation not hitherto established, shall be built up from the beginning. Late in the course of a friendship established long before, moral help, even moral criticism, may be welcome. But it cannot often or easily be one of the topics of conversation, one of the points of investigation, in the early stages of what we hope to make a friendly relation. Everything stands or falls with this. We cannot even teach hygiene, we cannot even make medical principles clear unless we have succeeded to some extent, perhaps without any merit on our part, perhaps through extraordinary good fortune, in acquiring a genuine liking for the person whom we want to help. Once that is attained, we can work miracles. But if it is wholly lacking, we cannot count upon accomplishing the simplest interchange of accurate information; we cannot achieve the most elemental hygienic instruction.