"The Association has empowered the Prize Committee to award the premium of the present year to the best popular tract upon the subject of induced abortion. The writer presents the accompanying paper neither for fame nor for reward. It has been prepared solely for the good of the community. If it be considered by the Committee worthy its end, they will please adjudge it no fee, nor measure it by any pecuniary recompense. Were the finances of the Association such as to warrant it in more than the most absolutely necessary expenditures, yet would the approbation of the Committee, and of the profession at large, be more grateful to the writer than any tangible and therefore trivial reward. "It is a singular and appropriate coincidence that the action of the Association, originating as it did from Boston, in 1857, and recognizing in no uncertain language, alike by the resolutions that were formally adopted by the Louisville Convention, and by the memorial presented by its President to the different legislative assemblies and State Medical Societies of the Union, the necessity of a radical change as to the popular estimate of the crime,--should now culminate and become effective at a meeting of the Association in Boston, by an authorized appeal in behalf of the profession to the community, which alone makes and enforces the laws, till now a dead letter as regards abortion, and which alone commits, palliates, and suffers from the crime. It it is an equally striking and appropriate coincidence that the Chairman of the Committee, at whose hands the selection of that appeal must be made, though the Committee had been chosen for a general purpose before it had been decided by the Association to elicit essays upon this special subject, should be the physician who, in New England, first appreciated the frequency of criminal abortions, pointed out their true character, and denounced them. "If this Essay prove successful, its author only asks that the seal which covers his identity may not be broken until the announcement is made upon the platform of the Convention, pledging himself that this is but for a whim of his own, and that he is well, and he trusts favorably known, by many of the best men of the Association throughout the Union."[2] There is one point, in connection with the present Essay, to which I feel bound, in fairness alike to my professional brethren and to those for whom I have now written, to direct attention. As every author who has decided opinions, and is alive to their importance, must naturally and very necessarily do, I have incidentally taken occasion to express myself upon certain collateral topics, but only in so far as they were directly connected with, and germane to, the main subject under discussion. Such statements are all of them to be considered merely as expressions of my own individual opinion, and not as the views, necessarily, of the mass of the profession.