I want to connect this subject of fatigue with one of the policies which should govern medical-social work, namely, that we should be honest both in diagnosis and in treatment. That is a policy for which I have struggled and fought for a long time, but which we are still far from attaining. We have not yet an honest practice of medicine on any large scale, a frank declaration to patients of what ails them, how they may avoid its recurrence and so avoid coming to the doctor again. In the American Red Cross Dispensaries in France we tried to pursue the policy of honesty in diagnosis and treatment. We were told by wise people at the beginning that it would not work there, that with French patients it would not do to explain carefully and honestly what was the matter or to refuse to give them drugs when we knew that drugs were no use. But one of the pleasantest experiences of our war work was to find that this warning was not true. We used the truth exclusively and successfully. Our success seemed to me natural because on the whole the French are the most intelligent race that I have ever come in contact with. Hence they took to this particular part of our policy even better than people take to it in America. That policy links itself up with the management of diseased states due to fatigue and with the explanation of how to prevent getting into poor condition again. In newspaper advertisements and advertisements in the street-cars, it is the fashion to state that a given remedy, a given panacea, "_will cure you in spite of yourself_." That is exactly what the patient wants. He wants to be put in perfect condition by the first of March, we will say. Inquiring into his present distress we almost always find that he has been violating in some obvious way some hygienic law. But he _wants to be cured without reform_, in spite of persisting in his bad habits of eating, drinking, sleeping, working, worrying--to be cured by means of miraculous interference which he thinks a drug will produce. He wants a tonic, and he often does not take it well when you tell him that there is no such thing as a tonic. There never was and presumably there never will be such a thing. A tonic is a thing which does nature's work, which gives us in a moment artificially what food and sleep and air and rest and recreation slowly and naturally give us. There is no such thing. The nearest thing we have to a tonic--a thing which we sometimes give when people ask for a tonic--is an appetizer. There are drugs which will help a little in giving an appetite. But only to that extent can we give a tonic. But this is not what people want to be told. They want something to take away "that tired feeling." There is one thing (as unfortunately people discover only too soon) which _will_ take away the feeling of fatigue--alcohol. That is why people take it, because alcohol, a narcotic as it always is, dulls the sense of fatigue,