I doubt if there is a single officer who wore the uniform of the Medical Corps who will not willingly admit that his army work better fitted him for civil practice and afforded him a deeper understanding of the needs of suffering humanity. The great and crowded days of the medical internist in the United States came with the influenza epidemic. Thrilling, trying, and tragic was this period. At first in driblets, then in streams which increased with appalling rapidity, the men poured into the hospitals. In civil life a hospital with 250 beds is considered a very considerable institution and one of which the community it serves has reason to boast, yet the great base hospitals, sometimes with as many as 2,500 beds, were literally swamped with new cases, occasionally as many as 1,000 “flu” patients being brought in during a single day. These men had to be cared for and carried through. But how? Not only were there not enough hospitals in the land to hold them, but the medical profession, already drained of its practitioners by the demands of the army overseas, was unable to find enough, or nearly enough, physicians, nurses, and attendants, for the influenza, remember, showed no discrimination, attacking soldiers and civilians alike. When the epidemic descended upon the cantonments, barracks near the hospitals were taken over by the medical authorities, the well men being evacuated to tents in favor of the sick. In many instances buildings which did not have a stick of furniture in them in the morning were ready to receive patients by mid-afternoon. In the meantime cots, pillows, sheets, and blankets, three or four to each cot, had been moved in. Medicines, glasses, and all the other paraphernalia of modern medicine had been obtained. Fires had been started. Cooks, stoves, cooking utensils, food, and dishes appeared as at the wave of a magician’s wand. Medical officers and nurses had been assigned and had reported for duty. The Red Cross and other war service agencies were on hand. Arrangements had been made to care for the clothing and valuables of the patients and a hundred other details had received attention. And all this, mind you, in a few short hours. Surgical officers volunteered for medical service. Officers from the training-camps of the Medical Corps were sent by tens and twenties to help out. Every city, town, and village between the oceans was combed for nurses. There were not enough ambulances to transport the sick, so private motor-cars, taxicabs, even motor-trucks, were pressed into use. The drivers sat at their steering-wheels day and night until they could no longer keep their eyes open. Medical officers were on duty from daybreak until long after midnight, day after day, week after week. Nurses and orderlies kept at their work until they dropped from sheer exhaustion. This was the home equivalent of battle service. No sterner, no more gallant, resistance to the Hun assaults was ever made by the men on the firing-line in France