I have just been looking through the advertising pages of a number of medical journals and comparing them with the advertisements in the other publications, the literary periodicals and weeklies, and the trade papers. The comparison is not at all favorable to the medical journal advertising. It looks sombre, dull, uninteresting, and out of date. Much of it carries the same old cuts, the same old wording and the same old general style in use twentyfive years ago. Nearly all of it indicates lack of progress. On the other hand the advertising in all other publications even in the daily papers, is bright, at tractive, appealing and right up to the minute in illustrations and in phraseol

ogy.

The medical journal advertisers are rearly all large concerns that have built up their business through long

years of active effort and through persistent, conservative methods. Their growth has been largely due to hard work and in most cases it has been a slow growth. Occasionally a new firm. has come along with progressive ideas and has forged its way into a good business by its new methods. Such firms have won because of their progressive

ress.

While the chemical and kindred industries are and should be conservative in their claims there is no reason why their advertising should not be just as attractively displayed as the advertising of the other industries. This is a day of visualization; everywhere and in everything the appeal is made to the cye; it is an esthetic era in which everybody is in love with the beautiful in nature and in art. The printer's art is most highly developed, and business is using that art to its advantage. But for some unknown reason and with the few

est exceptions, the business that is related to medicine and surgery, has been slow to avail itself of that art.

Physicians and surgeons are much like all other people. They can be reached like others, by the artistic appeal, when other methods fail. You will find cn their office tables the most beautiful books and the most attractive publications along with the sombre medical journals. They, like all others, are cager to read the well displayed adver-tising in the other journals, and would even more gladly read the medical advertising in their professional journals if it were just as artistically presented, because that advertising is right in line with their daily work.

All medical journals are anxious to secure the largest results for their advertisers and would gladly welcome an effort at improvement in medical advertising, knowing that the drawing of an advertisement is even more dependent upon an attractive style than upon the number of persons that read it. l'oorly constructed advertising is passed over and produces poor results; good illustrations and skilltul display secure the business. In every city there are ad-writers and illustrators who are able to produce copy of a kind. to get business and every firm owes it to itself to secure the assistance necessary to give its advertising the largest Fossible pulling power.

No firm would employ a chemist who does not know his business; none would use the services of any but experts in any other department of their business; and yet by far the greater number turn over the preparation of advertising to just anybody around the place who will take the time to throw the copy together even though he may know as little about it as the office cat.

Ultra Conservatism.

The charge is made frequently that the medical profession is so conservative that it really retards medical science more than it advances a real understanding of disease and its treatment. Of course that charge is an overstatement of facts, but the fact that it is made and at times by reputable physicians should be a warning to organized medicine that it can be too conservative.

The resignation last spring of Dr. Albert Abrams, of San Francisco, from the American Medical Association, is one of the cases in point. Dr. Abrams is progressive, perhaps too progressive for his own good, and certainly too progressive to please the average physician of the country. His field is clearly one. of

experimentation. and his experiments and studies lead him far in advance of the average physician. He may make mistakes, doubtless does make mistakes, but those who have been leaders in medical science have always made mistakes, and many who cannot claim any leadership are constantly doing so.

Dr. Abrams resignation was brought about by an offending article in the journal of the Association criticising his theory of the radio-activity of discase, the article stating, "If there is any foundation for the marvels that Dr. Abrams so picturesquesly features, the scientific world has not yet found it out." The scientific world looks to leadership like that of progressives of the Abrams type for its discoveries, and the medical association should not persecute Abrams simply because it can. not understand him or even because it cannot follow him. Leaders in medicine have always been ridiculed for their advance ideas in the past-many of them for ideas that have later been adopted

but in this enlightened generation, a profession with such grave responsibilities as medicine has in the affairs of the world should welcome every suggestion for its advancement, even though the suggestion may ultimately prove fallacious.

So long as organized medicine insists that it must thoroughly understand every theory advanced and every purported discovery before it even goes to the trouble of thorough investigation and trial, just so long will it stand condemned by thinking people for its nonprogressiveness. Advances are being made in every thing else, why not in medicine? All scientific study is based on progress, all other scientists are anxious to go deeply into every unusual theory heard or advanced before condemning or disapproving it. Medicine alone seems unwilling to entertain innovations, and seemingly prefers to content itself with the knowledge of the fathers.

This journal holds no brief for Dr. Abrams. He may be as crazy as a bat about the radio activity of disease for all it knows, but Dr. Abrams is a physician of recognized ability, a student far in advance of his day, and his yiews should receive all due consideration, rather than hostile criticism. At least he is a scientist of sufficient authority to be treated with the utmost courtesy rather than with public rebuke, whether he be right or wrong in whatever thought he may be advancing. There are "new things under the sun" these -days, some of them startling, it is true, and we may as well prepare ourselves to receive them with friendliness after they have had opportunity to prove their worth. Certainly we should not be quick to class as "quackery" a thing just because it is not understood.

Dr. Abrams gave as his reason for

resigning that "it will permit me to work untrammeled by the medical profession." What a pity that a conscientious medical scientist is made to feel that he is not at liberty to work untrammeled by his fellow scientists with whom he holds membership: Why should scientists of any class try to tether their members? Surely the medical profession as a whole does not wish. to circumscribe efforts of its members for the scientific advancement of the profession.

Still Dr. Abrams in resigning from the American Medical association feels justified from his experience in saying: "The conservatism of the medical profession is so great that one is prompted to recall what a compatriot of Talleyrand said of the latter's conservatism, that 'if Talleryand were present at the creation he would have exclaimed, "Good gracious chaos will be destroyed."

President R. E. Vinson, of the University of Texas, is quoted as saying in a recent address that the medical stucents of the University are, in his opinion, the most earnest body of students. in the University. They stand around. the class rooms and laboratory doors in the mornings waiting for them to be opened for them to go to work, and that they almost have to be driven from the rooms at night. He gives as the reason for this that these students have definite aims in their studies toward which they are working, that they know just why they are in school and what they hope to get from it.

That should be the attitude not only of medical students but of all practitioners. Medicine is, or at least should be, a progressive science requiring the