May I impress the fact upon you that an ethical man, with a just appreciation of his duty to his patients, can never be a vendor of patent or unofficial medicines. Indeed, I would be lacking in my duty if, with the opportunity this paper offers me, I did not, from the standpoint of experience, impress upon you with all of the force at my command the necessity of being wary of the detail man and the alluring advertising literature with which your mail will be flooded. You will scarcely have opened your office, and be waiting with what patience you can command that rush of the halt, the lame and the blind to which you feel that your talents entitle you, before the suave detail man, having heard of the new field, puts in his appearance. What you lack in therapeutic experience he can supply you by drawing liberally on the experience of others who have worked little less than miracles in an adjoining town by the use of his pills and potions, his elixirs and tinctures. You will find him smooth and oily, placid and plausible. He knows his story well, and even by his much speaking can almost persuade you that what you knew, or thought you knew, or what you had recently been taught, were all out of date; that by some stroke of genius the chemist of his house had discovered some way by which compatibles would combine with incompatibles into the formation of a new and staple mixture, possessing all of the virtues and none of the defects of its original constituents, rendering chloral as soothing as the strings of a lute and as harmless as the cooing of a dove, extracting from cod-liver oil every disagreeable feature and leaving nothing but its supposed virtues behind. He will show you the short road to fortune and success. Treat him kindly; the ethical man should not be rude, and brusqueness is not a sign of Roman honesty or virtue. Be assured he feels his position keenly, and is dreading the catechism which will sooner or later display his ignorance of everything but the story that has been drilled into him like a parrot.