By way of illustration: Dr. Arthur Vidrine, a back-country physician, was catapulted into the superintendency of the state’s huge Charity Hospital at New Orleans, and later was additionally made dean of the new state university College of Medicine Long decided to found. Vidrine had won the new governor’s warm regard by captaining the Long cause in Ville Platte, where he was a general practitioner. In some quarters there is a disposition to regard Arthur Vidrine as no more than a hack who relied on political manipulation to secure professional advancement. While it is obvious that his original support of, and later complete subservience to, Huey Long brought him extraordinary preferment, it must not be overlooked that in 1920, when he was graduated from Tulane University’s college of medicine, he was a sufficiently brilliant student to be chosen in open, nonpolitical competition for the award of a Rhodes scholarship, and that for two years he took advantage of this grant to pursue his studies abroad. After his return he served for a time as junior intern at New Orleans’ huge Charity Hospital ... and within four years he was made superintendent of that famous institution and dean of his state university’s new medical school, both appointments being conferred on him by newly elected Governor Huey Long, who lost no opportunity to picture his protégé as something of a miracle man in the realm of healing. To an early joint session of the legislature, His Excellency announced that under his administration Dr. Vidrine had reduced cancer mortality at Charity Hospital by one third. This was obvious nonsense. Had it not been, the medical world would long since have beaten a path to the ornamental iron gates of the century-old hospital in quest of further enlightenment. One of the newspapers finally solved the mystery of this miracle of healing. It stemmed solely from a change in the system of tabulating mortality statistics. Calculated on the old basis, the death rate was precisely what it had been before, a little better in some years, a little worse in others. All this was set forth publicly in clear, simple wording. But except for a few of the palace guard, who cynically shrugged the explanation aside, not one of the Long followers accorded it the slightest heed. They and their peerless standard bearer continued to glory in the “fact” that he had reduced Charity’s cancer death rate by a third. This accomplishment was by no means the only one of which young Governor Long boasted. Less tactfully, and certainly less judiciously, he made vainglorious public statements to the effect that “I hold all fifty-two cards at Baton Rouge, and shuffle and deal them as I please”; also that he had bought this legislator or that, “like you’d buy a sack of potatoes to be delivered at your gate.”