Furthermore, the community itself should not be daunted if the physicians as a body do not endorse the prospect of a tuberculosis nurse. This prejudice against public health nursing is the common experience in all cities where visiting work has been established, but it gradually wears off as the nurse is able to demonstrate her value. Little by little the doctors are won over, as they begin to realize that she is not a rival but an assistant. In Baltimore, our experience has been that those physicians who were at first our worst opponents have now become our staunchest and warmest friends. CHAPTER VII The General Practitioner and the Public Health—Responsibility of the Private Practitioner in Tuberculosis—Impossibility of Fulfilling this Obligation—Failure because of the Nature of Tuberculosis—Failure through the Personal Equation. =The General Practitioner and the Public Health.= Roughly speaking, we may say that the medical profession is divided into three or four branches—private practice, hospital or laboratory work, and public health service. A man who takes up one of these branches is not necessarily interested in or equipped for another. While all physicians are supposed to have approximately the same medical education, and therefore to be interested in those measures which tend to raise and improve the standard of public health, it is only those who are most keenly interested in this work who have made it a special study. For it must be remembered that public health work is as much a specialty and calls for as much training and ability along certain lines as laboratory work, or the administration of an institution. This being so, a man who goes in for it does so because he is more interested in it than in private practice, or in research work. And the converse of this is also true. The selection of one field rather than another is a matter of individual taste or inclination. Yet curiously enough, the State does not take note of this fact. It places certain obligations upon all members of the medical profession, and expects them all to live up to the responsibilities thus arbitrarily imposed.