=Consideration for Patients.= The first consideration of the dispensary should be the comfort and welfare of the patients. We have known many dispensaries where the first consideration was the experience of the students or physicians, the patient being regarded merely as good clinical material. In dispensaries connected with medical schools, which are essentially used for teaching purposes, this condition is unfortunately necessary, yet we cannot believe that it is necessary to the extent to which it is sometimes carried. We have often known of “interesting” cases being held up for hours, in order that they might be examined by certain men, or groups of students; moreover, this detention, prolonged examination, and exposure often took place when the patient was very weak, when he lost his job through the delay, or when a husband’s dinner, a nursing baby, or a houseful of children made such detention intolerable. Patients often refuse to return to a large dispensary on the ground that “they keep you all day, everyone in the place examines you, and you get so tired and sick you have to stay in bed for a week afterward.” This lack of consideration—failure to look upon the patient as a human being—is what tends to make dispensaries unpopular. We have known patients to come straight from such an experience and deliver themselves into the hands of a quack. However necessary it may be to use certain dispensaries as teaching centres, the tuberculosis campaign demands clinics of another kind. If the tuberculosis dispensary is to be a factor in the fight against this disease, it cannot afford to be a training school as well—it should be in charge of men already trained. =Function of the Dispensary.= It follows, then, that the function of the municipal dispensary is of necessity different from that established for teaching purposes. The larger dispensary serves a double purpose, the little dispensary serves but one; it is an examining station for making diagnoses. Here the patient should come as informally as he would to a doctor’s office, and here he should be able to consult experienced men. We feel that the informality of these little clinics constitutes their strong point. The patients are not afraid of them, and their great advantage lies in their social rather than their scientific value. They are merely places where a communicable disease may be discovered at the earliest possible moment.