Editorials.

Every Man's Duty.

In the present agitation of the study of therapeutics we feel that we are occupying high ground, and are not floundering around in the flood that envelops our position. Notwithstanding that fact, it was never so necessary that each individual of us should do hard study in therapeutic lines as it is now. Every statement we have put upon record in the past is going to be questioned; every declaration will be investigated; every erronous statement that we have made will be used as a lever against us.

For the future we must get out of the ruts that many of us have allowed ourselves to fall into. We must do individual work as we have never done it before. We must refuse to accept every statement as to drug action, as infallible. We must question as others will, the correctness of our own assertions.

All this time every man of us must go right along and "saw wood" and do it with increased energy; we must prove or disprove statements for ourselves; more than likely in this insight and close observation each of us will add something to the statement made or may be able to clear up some point that is in doubt.

We must have and we will have exact therapeutics. That is the entire object of this journal. It is a journal of close study, it is a journal of critical study, it is a journal of persistent, exact and precise study, and its record of such studies must necessarily include a record of researches and observations made bv every subscriber. There are very many of our plain everyday plodding country doctors who are full of gold nuggets of therapeutic facts and don't know it. I want to draw them out. We must have their facts for all.

I talked once to a doctor who was located forty miles from any other physician in a most unpromising locality. He collected less than five hundred dollars a year out of his business because of the poverty of his patrons. He lived and saved money and schooled his daughter out of that amount. That plain, unpretentious doctor, when I drew him out, gave me more new, straight, practical therapeutic pointers in the single hour that I talked with him, than I had got many times out of the entire membership of the annual session of some Medical Societies. Our surroundings, our necessities, our results, teach us these valuable lessons. We must give them up to others. Let us have yours, doctor, without delay.

Ellingwood's Therapeutist, Vol. 2, 1908, was edited by Finley Ellingwood M.D.