How many a case of simple sore throat or tonsilitis is being paraded as a case of diphtheria. Why, I know of doctors who built up their reputations in that way. It is quite an easy matter, to call an ordinary, simple case of bronchitis, pneumonia. Harmless swellings, no matter of what sort, are treated and palmed off every day as cancers. The quack cancer doctor is almost ubiquitous. Some would much rather part with the village parson, or their regular old town doctor, than to part with the cancer doctor. Diseases that are conjured up in the minds of susceptible or hypochondriac persons have for them a real existence, because if a person believes he has a certain disease, it becomes a reality, as far as his own state of mind is concerned, and as far as the treatment is concerned to him who created the delusion, it is much more desirable than if the disease were real, because you can cure an imaginary disease, which may be impossible when a real one comes under treatment. This is another method of making a reputation for extraordinary cures that really never occurred. When I contemplated writing a book, which I hoped to make a _vade mecum_ for those who felt interested in the subject, I felt that it would be a duty which I should reluctantly perform, for it would be a criticism on the status of the medical profession of this country. I was convinced that whatever I said that would lower the tone of the profession in the estimation of my countrymen would naturally reflect on me as unfavorably as upon any other member, for I never claimed to be anything else but an American physician, and, as such, I have an ambition to elevate the rank and file to honor and respectability. There is also a motive that underlies a work of this nature which should appear justifiable to the author. It is absolutely necessary that side-lights should be thrown into dark corners and recesses that are usually screened from public notice. If there is a growing deterioration in methods of proficiency and morals, the public should know it, for who is the greater villain, he who trifles with human life through officious ignorance and venturous operations, or the midnight assassin, who, under cover of darkness, waylays his unwary victim? The title “doctor,” from the Latin _doceo_, “I teach,” has a halo of learning that it derives from the original significance that was attached to it when it was first sanctioned at Bologna University, about the middle of the twelfth century, where it first passed into the faculty of divinity. It was afterwards introduced into the universities of Northern Europe, and remained ever since a degree of distinction in theology, law, philosophy, and medicine. In the German universities _doctor_ implies also a license to teach within the university, as a _privat-docent_.