=The Physician’s Service.= If a community decides to establish a dispensary, the first step must be to secure the services of a physician. At first this may be voluntary, and many doctors will gladly offer an hour or two of their time, once or twice a week. Should there be great pressure of work, it may be possible to find several men willing to offer their time. But however willingly and freely offered—for most physicians are generous in response to calls of this sort—it must be remembered that, after all, this service is gratuitous. The busy physician will often be obliged to side-track his dispensary obligations, in favour of urgent private calls. This is only to be expected, yet too many such side-trackings are bad for the dispensary. The patients lose confidence in it; it is discouraging for a roomful of sick people to find no one to receive them. Experience teaches us to look askance at all volunteer work, no matter how generously or sincerely offered. Under certain conditions it may have to be accepted, but whenever possible, the physician in charge of the dispensary should be paid. It is fairer to him, and fairer to the patients. The Health Department of Baltimore has three special tuberculosis dispensaries, each open twice a week, for two hours at a time. The physician in charge is paid a good salary, and as a result, the regularity of his attendance is in sharp contrast to that in certain other dispensaries, where the work is done by well meaning but overworked men who volunteer their services. Tuberculosis is a disease that cannot be overcome by volunteer work or economical methods. =The Physician’s Qualifications.= The success of the dispensary depends upon the ability and character of the physician in charge. He should be able to make a diagnosis by means of auscultation and percussion, without hesitating to commit himself until a sputum examination reveals the bacilli.[7] For if finding the bacilli is to be the sole test by which tuberculosis may be recognized, it would be possible for the nurse to obtain specimens of sputum from her patients and submit them to the laboratory direct—thus doing away with the doctor and proving the dispensary superfluous. Footnote 7: See Chapter IX., page 109. Nor is this all. The physician must have a strong social sense, and be able to inspire his patients with confidence. In no other work does the personal character play so large a part, and this applies to the doctor as well as to the nurse. One of our patients, enthusiastic in her praise of one of the dispensary men, summed this up with homely accuracy: “He couldn’t have been nicer to me if I’d paid him fifty cents in his office.”