=The Patient’s Chart.= Each patient should have a chart made out for him at the moment when he is taken on the visiting list. This also applies to suspects, or those for whom the diagnosis is not positive, but whom the nurse is required to visit and care for. This also applies to those moribund patients, who may live but a few hours after being reported, and who die before a second visit can be made. Whether he has been on the list a year or an hour, it is necessary to account for every patient who passes under supervision, and to record the result in each case. Unless this is done, accurately and promptly, it will be impossible to estimate the amount of work, and its value to the community. The patient’s chart should contain name, sex, age, colour, address, occupation, social status (married, single, or widowed), and a brief history concerning the onset and progress of his disease. These charts may be as simple or as elaborate as one desires. Herewith is submitted a specimen chart, such as are used in Baltimore; they are not perfect, nor the acme of all that is or might be desirable in a record of this kind, but they have proved simple and fairly satisfactory. There is much left out which with advantage might have been added, but in this connection it is well to remember that an elaborate and exhaustive history, one demanding dozens of intimate details, is apt to alarm the patient excessively. To collect exhaustive statistics would be valuable for the sociologist, but to do so at the expense of the patients’ confidence and trust would be to defeat the object of the work itself. [Illustration: Patient’s Chart. Cardboard, five by eight inches] [Illustration: Reverse side of Patient’s Chart, showing spaces for recording visits. The Second Chart Sheets are similar to this, but alike on both sides] The reverse side of this chart contains spaces in which each visit may be recorded. Sometimes these charts are kept up for months and years, and it is therefore necessary to have what are called second sheets—alike on both sides, and resembling the reverse side of the first sheet, which contains the patient’s history. These sheets are fastened together, and the chart of a chronic case may thus record hundreds of visits. Each nurse is responsible for keeping up the charts of all patients under her supervision. The notes should be carefully recorded at the end of each day’s work, for it is bad policy to let this charting accumulate for even two or three days. The entries should be brief and concise, and should describe the patient’s condition, or the work done for him.