This is why effective tuberculosis work must place the emphasis on the control of the last-stage cases, since it is the advanced case which is of most danger to society. For example: we have two families, one of which contains a moderately advanced case, whose outlook is favourable, while the second contains a last-stage case with a hopeless prognosis. Both patients are equally intractable; the nurse has but a limited time at her disposal, and must choose between the two, since she cannot divide her days equally between them. From the point of view of the individual, care of the earlier case would better repay her time and effort; from the standpoint of the greatest good to the greatest number, she must concentrate her efforts on the advanced case, since it is this one which is immediately dangerous. The earlier case is less of a menace to those about him; his obstinacy and refusal to follow advice mean loss of that precious time in which life and death are determined—but if he chooses, however wilfully, to waste this time, it is his own loss after all. It involves no one else. On the other hand, much more is involved in the advanced case. Here the patient’s death is inevitable, but it can be kept from occurring amid circumstances which would drag down others with him. In the majority of cases, the death of the patient is the issue to be expected, however much it may have been delayed or postponed—a result saddening and discouraging to those whose previous training has been to preserve life. What nurses are not trained to see, and what many of them have neither imagination nor faith enough to see, is the number of lives that are probably saved through the safeguarding of a dying individual. It has been said that the world would be infinitely better off if every consumptive in it could die to-day, since by this loss the people of to-morrow would be saved. The nurse must cease to reckon in terms of hundreds of patients—she must reckon in terms of the thousands who come in contact with these patients. The amount that can be done to protect these thousands is the standard by which the work must be judged a failure or a success. If she bears this constantly in mind, she will not become so easily discouraged. Therefore, to sum up once more: upon entering the home, the nurse’s first care is the family, and her second is the patient himself. But it is by working through the latter that the former may be reached. The patient himself is the point of attack, and if in the ensuing pages he becomes so prominent as to delude one into thinking that his welfare alone is the final goal, he is only made prominent in order that we may reach our goal more quickly.