heaters; if he does not
help the health board, the public hospitals, the schools, the factory,
and tenement departments enforce sanitary laws, he is derelict as a
citizen and as a member of an "exalted profession." If he sees only
the patients he himself treats or one particular malady, he is derelict
as a teacher, no matter how charming his personality or how skilled in
his specialty. If a school physician is slovenly in his work, if he
spends fifteen minutes when he is paid for an hour, should the
efficient school-teacher conceal the fact from her superiors because he
is a physician? If private hospitals misrepresent facts or compromise
with political evils for the sake of a gift of public money, their
offense is more heinous because of their exalted purpose. The test of a
physician's worth to his patients and to his community is not what he
is or what he has learned, and not what his profession might be, but
what happens to patient and to community. Human welfare demands that
the medical profession be judged by what it does, not by what it might
do if it made the best possible use of its knowledge or its
opportunity.

[Illustration: TOO MANY PHYSICIANS AND EVEN MATERNITY HOSPITALS
FAIL TO TEACH MOTHERS, EITHER BEFORE OR AFTER BABIES ARE BORN
Caroline Rest Educational Fund was given to show the value of
such teaching]

A dispensary that treats more patients than it can care for properly is
no better than a street-car company that chronically provides too few
seats and too many straps. Unless physicians test themselves and their
profession by results, we shall be compelled to "municipalize the
medical man." Preventable sickness costs too much, causes too much
wretchedness, and hampers too many modern educational and industrial
activities to be neglected. If the medical profession does not fit
itself to serve general interests, then cities, counties, and states
will take to themselves the cure as well as the prevention of
communicable and other preventable sickness. Human life and public
health are more precious than the medical profession, more important
even than theories and traditions against public interference in
private matters. The unreasoning opposition of medical men to
government protection of health, their concentration on cure, and their
tardy emphasis on prevention have forced many communities to stumble
into the evil practices mentioned in Chapter XVI. Incidentally, the
best physicians