=The Problem of Relief-Giving.= Giving financial assistance or relief to patients on or below the poverty line is a question which sooner or later confronts the nurse who undertakes social work. Long hours, overwork, and low wages produce a class of people who offer little or no resistance to disease, and when tuberculosis once gets a foothold amongst them, it is passed on from one devitalized individual to another. This is why it is necessary to remove a disease-distributor from among a group of highly susceptible individuals. For example: let us take a family consisting of father, mother, and four children. The father contracts tuberculosis and stops work—his income also stops. Even at best, it was a pitifully inadequate income, and in consequence the entire family is undernourished, anæmic, and generally run down. With the income gone, their resistance is still further lowered, and their chances of infection are correspondingly increased. The result is a patient surrounded by a group of people able to offer but slight opposition to this insidious disease. The environment, bad as it was originally, grows worse. The family moves into smaller, fewer, cheaper rooms, and food, heat, clothing are all reduced to a minimum. This increasing poverty means diminished vitality, and heightened susceptibility to the threatening danger. In attempting to relieve this situation we are dealing not with a simple, but with a twofold problem—poverty, plus an infectious disease. Because of its complex nature, the question of giving assistance is a difficult and delicate matter. In our efforts to relieve distress and want, we must be careful to do nothing which will result in spreading tuberculosis. The paramount consideration is the prevention of infection, and for this reason, relief should be made conditional upon the removal or reduction of the danger. If we keep this idea firmly before us, the problem will be much simplified.