of the most necessary factors in every community;
yet for many rural communities the nearest up-to-date physician is many
miles away.

In these days of specialists, "general practice" is relatively less
attractive. There is some danger also that the fine idealism which has
long characterized this splendid profession may yield to the growing
commercialism which to-day threatens all professions like a canker. When
surgeons operate for dollars instead of for a cure; and physicians make
the art of healing strictly business instead of scientific kindness, it
will be a sad day for humanity.

The work of the physician is not properly a business; it should be classed
as _social service_ of the highest order. In spite of the higher standards
of medical schools recently[41] with an emphasis on a general college
preparation, fewer college men are going into medicine. The percentage has
steadily decreased since 1850, and in the past twelve years there has been
a sharp decline. The proportion at Harvard College has declined one-half
in thirty years, though meanwhile Harvard Medical School has become a
strictly graduate department.

It is evident that luxury-loving collegians are avoiding the medical
profession to-day just as they are dodging the ministry. If they have
capital of their own, business offers them a larger income and makes
little demand upon their sympathies in personal service. _Selfish men
avoid the costs of life-sharing_ which a life in close personal
associations compels, as is true of teaching, the ministry and the medical
profession. But this is no handicap but greater opportunity, for men of
real earnestness.

_The Special Need of Country Doctors_

The profession is seriously overcrowded in the cities, but people in the
rural districts are literally dying for trained physicians. Some medical
faculties are advising their graduates not to stay in the city but to
settle in country villages where they are most needed, and where quite
possibly they would find greatest success. "There are many towns in this
state," writes a medical professor, "with only 500 to 1,000 people, where
a young physician could do well and where he is needed."

Although, according to the best data obtainable, most medical graduates
settle in cities,--the proportion at the College of Physicians and
Surgeons, New York, being as high as 90%,--there is a rapidly increasing
demand for them in the suburban and rural sections in the East bec