Again, patients of the poorer classes continually change their doctors. Unlike people in more fortunate circumstances, they have no one physician to whom they always turn when in trouble. To such as these, the “family doctor” is unknown. Their fickle interest is attracted by the newest shingle, and they pay a visit or two to its owner and they depart. We knew one patient who visited five different doctors within the week. Small wonder that the doctor forgets these patients—mere transients—and that, even if he has time to diagnose them, he does not consider himself their physician, or responsible for them in any way. It is for just such cases, however—those patients who come into fleeting and haphazard relation with their physician, that municipal control is required. It is no reflection upon the private practitioner that he has failed to make headway against tuberculosis. It simply proves that people with this disease must be watched and cared for by those who are able to devote their entire time to it. So much for the disease itself, and for the sociological and psychological conditions which complicate it, and make it a matter which cannot be handled successfully by the man in private practice. For no matter how conscientious he may be, or how willing to assume the full responsibility imposed by the State, he cannot do this when the patients refuse him the opportunity. He cannot follow them up at the expense of his private obligations. While the State expects service from those whom it licenses to practise, it does not expect the impossible. =Failure through the Personal Equation.= We must now consider the second reason for removing tuberculosis from private into public control. For while the nature of the disease itself explains in large measure why it cannot be dealt with by the private practitioner, that is not the entire explanation. And here we must put the blame where it belongs—at the door of the physician himself. When we think of the medical profession, we unconsciously think of its finest members—not only of the leaders in thought and achievement, but the numbers of highly educated, advanced, efficient, and conscientious men who form so large a part of it. In thinking of these, however, we are apt to overlook men of another sort, who are less well equipped, or who are imbued with commercialism, yet who are none the less members of this great profession. Yet even the least of these is armed, and has the sanction of the State in bearing these arms, which may be used either against a common enemy, or in a guerilla warfare in behalf of his own interests. The wide diversity among its individual members is the reason why the medical profession has been unable to act as a united whole in the warfare against tuberculosis.