Diagnosis or Therapeutics.

In our study of therapeutics we may arrive at a point, where we can truly claim to be specialists in therapeutics. Dr. Abbott, in The American Journal of Clinical Medicine, reproduced the following item from The Journal of Therapeutics and Dietetics:

"In this day of specialism, in all the various branches of human work, there is a crying need that more of the medical fraternity fit themselves to become therapeutic specialists. A number of years ago the writer took a patient to a leading specialist in a large eastern city. We spent an hour together going over the case and fixed the diagnosis to the satisfaction of all concerned. Then I said to the specialist, 'What are we going to do about it?' The great specialist threw up his hands and exclaimed, 'Good Heavens, I have not thought of treatment for the last fifteen years.' I said to him, 'This patient has come five hundred miles not to get a diagnosis, but to be cured. Can you make me no suggestions whatever in the treatment of this case ?' He could not. That was entirely out of his line. He was a diagnostician."

It is almost impossible to conceive a condition existing among us similar to the one described, and yet a therapeutic specialist at this day and age of the world is a rarity indeed, at a time when such are greatly needed. I say, let there be more therapeutic specialists. [F. E.]

Ellingwood's Therapeutist, Vol. 3, 1909, was edited by Finley Ellingwood M.D.