This may explain the paucity of clinical and scientific information as to addiction-disease coming from the institutions in which these cases are gathered. It seems to be the fact that the narcotic wards of our great charity hospitals and institutions of custody and correction still in great measure proceed with their handling of narcotic addicts on the basis of mental or moral degeneracy or deficiency or weakness of will, or morbid appetite, etc., or apply one or another of the various remedies or combinations of remedies. Their internes and nurses do not seem to graduate with a conception of addiction as a definite physical disease, with clinically significant symptomatology and constant physical reactions and phenomena. That these institutions have after many years given us so little information as to the definite physical symptoms and phenomena which their patients constantly manifest is in large measure the result of attention directed to control of drug use instead of to alleviation of physical addiction-disease. There has been much discussion over various methods of treatment and over measures for the control of patient and of narcotic drug, and there has been insufficient study and analysis of the clinical details of addiction-disease manifestations and their possible therapeutic significance. There has been of late, however, signs of change in this situation, and in this change lies one of the greatest hopes of solution of the narcotic drug problem. The attitude towards addiction is beginning to follow the trend of modern medicine in getting away from special or routine treatments, and the search for specifics and panaceas, and in aiming at and devoting great effort to the searching out, consideration of, and treatment of fundamental cause and underlying condition. When this method of approach is applied widely to addiction-disease, and the facilities of our great hospitals and institutions of research properly directed to its furtherance, there will come a re-arrangement of conception of opiate addiction. Restraint and custodial care, and psychologic and psychiatric classification will be applied more sparingly. Many worthy sick people will--instead of being refused treatment, or turned back upon their own resources after inadequate treatment--thus adding to the public and private burden of the care of the unfit--be rationally treated as sick people and returned to health and self-supporting competency.