It may be somewhat out of place in a paper dealing with "The Ethics of the General Practitioner" to speak of the tendency, or perhaps better, the half-formed determination of the majority of every class to be specialists. I must confine myself to the predilection of the average medical student for surgery. It was so in my day, and I suppose it is so now, that almost 75 per cent. of the graduating classes are thoroughly satisfied that the end and aim of medicine is surgery; that practice and the less spectacular branches are parts of the profession essential to it as a whole, and fitted for those who intend to lead the plodding life, but too slow and too prosaic for the man bursting with the knowledge of his own brilliancy and his own special fitness. There is no question but that this tendency has done much to lower the average fitness of many classes. Men become listless and careless, neglecting everything but their hobby, and while the surgical amphitheatre is crowded, the medical clinics will be shunned, even deserted were it not that the sections are such that the absentees can be spotted and warned. There is no question also but that indifference to everything but surgery is responsible for many of the failures before the State Examining Boards. We must have surgeons, and they must begin their training in medical schools, and it is not my purpose to discourage earnest work and honest effort to this end. I wish, however, to say that every ethical specialist needs a thorough grounding in the general branches of medicine, and he should not in his student days neglect the other essentials to a well-rounded man. Most heartily do I wish to condemn the careless, happy-go-lucky manner in which so many men totally unprepared and totally unsuited by temperament for this branch "rush in where angels fear to tread." I wish especially to draw your attention to the fact that there is a vast difference between the operator and the surgeon. Almost any young man with a disregard of the sight of blood, with nerves unaffected by human suffering and a heart untouched by a knowledge of his power to do harm, can in six months' practice on the cadaver learn to cut, to sew and to ligate with neatness and despatch. Indeed, there may be many before me of the student body whose young and nimble fingers could teach dexterity to the best surgeons of the city. Very many with no pretense to this dexterity, and no equipment but a superabundance of assurance, graduate as surgeons and assume and aspire to a position of prominence that it has taken the true surgeon years of the hardest, closest, most untiring study, observation and work to reach. We are told as an excuse for this remarkable evolution from the student to the surgeon that the young man of today is taught so much more than the old men were; that the very manner of teaching, the equipment of the schools and the superior requirements for matriculation cannot but turn out better posted and more competent men.