Why were the rates for life assurance going down and the rates for annuities going up? It was because people were living longer and because there was less disease. The people in life assurance offices had no sentimental obsessions. They had regard only to the amount of cash they had to pay out. He failed to see what justification there was for talk about disease progressing. Anyone who had had his own lifetime of experience would know how disease after disease had been robbed of its terrors.

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... ES OF THANKS Lord Snell, there being no more questions, expressed the thanks of the gathering to the lecturer for a searching and stimulating address. He sometimes felt that when a layman took the chair for an eminent doctor he might be forgiven if he also had an opinion about the doctors as the doctors had about the laymen who were their patients. A very appropriate word, by the way, that word " patients." One went into what doctors called their consulting rooms, but they did not consult with you, they told you. Personally, under those conditions, such was his faith in the learning and wisdom of the profession, he left the consulting room half cured already. He had wanted to say another impertinent word to the profession, but after the lecture just delivered he had hardly the heart to do it. He was reminded of a story in Gil Blas of a man who went into a Spanish town and caught a fever, whereupon a cynic said that as there were no doctors there he would get off with nothing worse than a fright! Passing from such impertinences, he wished to say for himself that he had very much enjoyed listening to what Sir Walter had said. This question of health was pre-eminently one for association between the layman and the specialist. Within and without the profession they had the same desire to secure the general health. He noted that doctors were becoming much more statesmen than, he thought, was the case when he was young. They placed a greater emphasis now upon environment, upon the nature of occupation, upon food and raiment, upon culture and the development of mind and spirit. That all seemed to him, as a layman, to be on the right lines. They all knew, too, how much more prominent was -the part which State and municipal organizations were taking in respect of preventive and curative medicine. The London County Council, in the work of which he had a humble share, had seventy-six hospitals, including mental hospitals and institutions containing wards for the chronic sick. In these hospitals there were over 40,000 beds; the yearly admissions were about 230,000, the approximate number of staff over 20,000, and the cost four millions a year. That seemed to him to be development on the right lines, because, after all, the poor needed the best treatment. The poor man's health was his only capital; if his health went he was bankrupt, and to put it on no higher ground than his economic value, it was the nation's business to get him well as soon as possible. Doctors, in co-operation with municipalities and friendly societies, in bringing to bear on this problem the newer knowledge of medicine, were acting in accord with the highest traditions of their profession.