space when man needs the helping sympathy of man. If our hearts are strong for good works, ways and means will readily appear for the exercise of our talents, our love, and our heroism. (Mrs. Fannie B. Williams.) [Illustration: F. A. STEWART, M.D., NASHVILLE, TENN.] THE COLORED PHYSICIAN IN THE SOUTH. BY H. R. BUTLER. When the civil war was over and the smoke of battle had cleared away, the field in the South was occupied by the red-eyed voodoo, who styled himself a "doctor." There were at that time possibly two or three exceptions to this rule, but only two or three. Should you ask one of these voodoo doctors, better known among the illiterate as "root workers," what might be his business, the answer would quickly be given something like this: "My trade? Dat am a doctor." "Is that so?" "Yes, sar; I is a root doctor from way back; and when I gits done standin' at de forks ob de road at midnight pullin' up roots, twixt de hollowin' ob de owls, and gittin' a little fresh dirt frum de graveyard--honey, dar am su'thin' agwinter drop." The above is part of a conversation held with me by one of these "herb kings" in South Carolina in 1890. Hence you can see that, like all other evils, these voodoo doctors do not die fast; and even to-day not a few still live. This being with his weird stories went forth among a people who were rocked, as it were, in the cradle of superstition, and early became monarch of all he surveyed. He or she was known and feared throughout the country. They claimed to be able to cure anything from consumption to an unruly wife or husband, and furnishing charms to make love matches and to keep the wife or husband at home was one of their specialties. Every patient they called on they diagnosed the trouble thus: he or she was tricked; if pneumonia, they were tricked; if a fever, they were tricked; or if a case of consumption, they were tricked. Their stock of medicines, if such we must call them, generally consisted of such things as small bags of graveyard soil, rusty nails, needles, pins, goose grease, rabbits' feet, snake skins, and many other such things. I say that a little more than a generation ago this was the class of so-called colored doctors that predominated in the South, and which for many years was a great stumbling-block to the educated physicians of our race, because it seemed to be understood that all colored doctors were and must be root doctors. But, thanks to Him who holds the destiny of races in his hands, in the flight of years and in this electric age of progress this voodoo doctor has almost--not entirely, but almost--passed away; while his territory is being occupied by colored physicians whose qualifications in education, character, and honor are equal to similar qualifications in the physicians of any other race.