If a workman, cured of rheumatism, goes back to his job in the damp cellar which caused it? If a clerk, fitted to glasses, returns to the dim desk which crippled her sight? If an unmarried girl, delivered of her child, goes from the maternity ward back to the neighborhood that ruined her? Medicine and surgery, supplemented by social service, not only cure disease but restore to full health and working capacity. The theory and practice of this youngest handmaiden of medical science are fully, simply and interestingly told in the latest Russell Sage Foundation Publication. Dr. Richard Cabot, of Boston, was one of the first physicians to emphasize the social background of health; but it is admitted on all sides that women are proper persons to treat the family and discover its needs. They are social physicians in a very real sense and their knowledge must be industrial, economic, psychological, as well as medical. At the fifteenth annual convention of the American Hospital Association held in Boston last summer (1914), Dr. Frederick Washburn, president of the association, insisted that the function of the hospital is not merely to treat patients acutely sick, but to aid in the prevention of disease, and to undertake social service and coöperation with community agencies. Other speakers dwelt on the necessity of better care of the “out-patient,” the social service side of health work. _The Survey_ had this to say: “A new note was struck by Elizabeth V. H. Richards, headworker of the social service department of the Boston Dispensary, who showed that the social service department is not only of assistance to individual patients, but that the medical social worker can be of value to the managing authorities of the institution as a whole, in studying the efficiency of its clinical work, and in planning the broader relations which its work may bear to other welfare resources in the community.” The home situation clearly has to be considered as well as the physical ailment in almost every case requiring medical care. Thus the task is a coöperative one between the social worker and the medical scientist. Every attempt to improve labor and living conditions is a similar aid to medical science if not to the medical profession, so that any proper study of health or physical well-being must lead us on to an examination of efforts for better housing, a living wage, for social insurance, for workmen’s compensation, and the many other devices that make a decent standard of living possible.