¹ It has long been known to those who cared to know, that a few professed psychologists, whose studies, sympathies, and talents have led them to take a special interest in the condition of persons suffering from mental troubles, have given them advice and treatment through “suggestion” and in kindred ways. This has been done on such a limited scale that the question has never arisen in connection with it whether a new medical specialty was likely to become thereby established. It has been, rather, an affair of personal enterprise and experiment, analogous to that of the Zürich engineer referred to in the text.

² Farrar, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, January, 1909.

³ I wish to acknowledge that it rests with the neurologists to see that the students who graduate at our medical schools have a far better training as regards the knowledge and qualities necessary for appreciating the needs of the nervous invalid and applying the suitable remedies than their predecessors have had. It is one of the advantages of specialism in medicine that the more prominent specialists, by gathering together and condensing into a small space the main results of their vast experience, can place at the service of their colleagues a collection of relatively simple principles of diagnosis and treatment which can then be utilized by a large number of practitioners. Every intelligent physician can thus obtain, if he will take the pains, a broad outlook over the whole field of medicine. But in order to take this broad view he must devote himself to the principles and practice of medicine with his whole heart and mind, making every other interest secondary to that. In order to give this teaching in the way it should be given, neurologists need endowed departments in our medical schools, and endowed hospitals in which nervous invalids can be adequately studied and treated. We must look for the means for accomplishing the difficult task before us to the liberality of interested members of the community. A generous friend of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore has already provided an ample fund for this purpose in that city. This example should be imitated elsewhere.

⁴ Helen Keller, Sense and Sensibility. Century Magazine, February and March, 1908.

⁵ I cannot leave this characterization of the physician's work without some reference to that of the social service workers, at present developed mainly in connection with certain hospitals and dispensaries. The nature of this admirable work, as organized three years ago at the Massachusetts Greneral Hospital by Dr. Richard C. Cabot, deserves particular mention. The physicians to the great dispensaries save out some two or three hours from a busy day and devote them to giving what advice they can to a large number of patients whose illnesses present problems of the most varied sorts. In the department to which I am attached the needs of as many as forty patients must at times be considered by the physician and his assistants in the course of one forenoon. It is obvious that these physicians cannot find time to know in detail what goes on within the homes of these many individuals, nor to what harmful influences they are exposed; nor can they give the patient labor needed for ferreting out the best measures of relief. All this the social service worker spends her day in doing, ever increasing thereby her own rich stock of kindness, hopefulness, and wisdom, and leading the patients to exhibit these qualities in their turn. A piece of therapeutic work unique in dispensary experience has been done, through the help of these workers, in maintaining instruction in clay-modelling for some of the nervous invalids attending as out-patients at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and the intelligent co-operation of an outside friend has made it possible for these same patients to attend lectures at the Museum of Fine Arts.