either to commercialize it and
lose his professional standing, or to abide the convenience of his
colleagues and their learned organizations in testing it. Rather than
be branded a quack, charlatan, or crank, the physician keeps silent as
to convictions which do not conform to the text-books. Many a
life-saving, health-promoting discovery which ought to be taken up and
incorporated into general practice from one end of the country to the
other, and which should be made a part of the minimum standard of
medical practice and medical agreement, must wait twenty-five or fifty
years for recognition.

[Illustration: THE DISCIPLE OF FRESH AIR AND HOME INSTRUCTION IS
STILL AN OUTCAST IN SCORES OF HOSPITALS]

For want of a school of preventive medicine to emphasize universally
every new truth, the medical colleges are permitted to remain
twenty-five or fifty years behind absolutely demonstrated facts as to
medical truth and medical practice. In 1761 a German physician,
Avenbruger, after discovering that different sounds revealed diseased
tissue, used "chest tapping" in the diagnosis of lung trouble. In 1815
Leannec discovered that sound from the chest was more distinct through
a paper horn. On that principle the modern stethoscope is built. He
made an accurate diagnosis of tuberculosis, and while suffering from
that disease treated himself as a living clinical study. In 1857
Pasteur proved the presence of germs "without which no putrefaction, no
fermentation, no decay of tissue takes place." In 1884 Trudeau started
the first out-of-door care of pulmonary tuberculosis in America. In
1892 Biggs secured the compulsory notification of pulmonary
tuberculosis. In 1904 began our first out-of-door sea-air treatment for
bone tuberculosis. Yet there are thousands of physicians to-day who
sincerely believe that they are earning their fees, who, from houses
shut up like ovens, give advice to patients for treatment of
tuberculosis, who prescribe alcohol and drugs, who diagnose the disease
as malaria for fear patients will be scared, who oppose compulsory
registration, and who never look for the tuberculous origin of crippled
children. Just think of its being possible, in 1908, for a tuberculous
young man of thirty to pay five dollars a day to a sanatorium whose
chief reliance is six doses of drugs a day!

In 1766 America's first dentist came to the United States. By 1785
itinerant dentists had built up a lucrative practice. In 18