It did not take the Medical Department many months to realize that it not only had on its hands thousands of sick and wounded soldiers but it also had the great American public—and the public required the most careful and tactful handling. Before we had been at war a year every conceivable sort of rumor in regard to the way in which the men in the hospitals were being treated was making the rounds. It was whispered that they did not get enough to eat, that they were not properly clad, that the physicians played poker and the nurses danced while their patients lay dying, that out-of-date methods of treatment were the rule, that the medical officers were incapable or overbearing. No rumor seemed too fantastic to receive credence. One woman alighted from her limousine at the entrance to the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington and asked to be shown the “basket cases.” Upon being asked by the puzzled attendants what she meant, she explained that she wished to see the soldiers who had lost both legs and arms, and who, she understood, were kept in baskets! And she was quite frankly sceptical when assured that neither at Walter Reed nor at any other military hospital in the United States was there a soldier who had lost both of his legs and both of his arms. In order to combat such ridiculous and harmful stories, to keep the public informed of the splendid treatment which the soldiers were receiving, and to cheer up the depressed and lonely soldiers themselves, the Publicity Section of the Surgeon-General’s Office established a series of hospital papers which covered the entire country. _The Come-Back_, edited and published at the Walter Reed Hospital, Washington, D. C., jumped in one issue to the ranks of the big dailies and steadily held its place in everything—news, editorials, cartoons, advertising, and circulation—that makes a successful newspaper. _The Right About_, published by the patients of Debarkation Hospital No. 3, located in the former Greenhut store in New York City, soon ran up a circulation of more than 50,000—at five cents a copy, too. Among the other papers was _The Trouble Buster_, published at Fort McHenry Hospital, Baltimore; _The Ward Healer_, at General Hospital No. 12, Biltmore, North Carolina; _The Pill Box_, at Debarkation Hospital No. 1, Ellis Island; _The Reclaimer_, General Hospital No. 34, East Norfolk, Massachusetts; _The Stimulant_, General Hospital No. 19, Lakewood, New Jersey, and a score or more of others with equally amusing names. The joyous, humorous, American spirit of these papers set a fashion of good cheer and sportsmanship among the patients, their attitude being characterized by the slogan shouted from the top of the first page of one of them: “The Come-Back chirps so loud that nobody has the nerve to growl.”