I quently the result of incompetent surgical services rendered the employe or passenger, who, by the railroad company had been placed in the hands of an unskilled, inexperienced, and consequently, incompetent physician, for treatment. This, in time, led to the appointment of "company surgeons," who, in the early liistory of railway surgery, were under the direct control and guidance of superintendents or managers. This was an important improvemont over the former, but far from attaining the

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... est order of railway surgery. Less than twenty years ago the first association of railway surgeons was organized, which had for its object the advancement and improvement of railway surgery. At that time such an office as Chief Surgeon was practically an " unknown quantity," and the now familiar "hospital system " was in its swaddling clothes, and it is less than ten pears since the following resoiution was offered by a prominent railway surgeon of Ohio, at a meeting of the Association of the Bee Line Surgeons, held at Cleveland: I n our opinion the surgical service of the Bee Line Railroad will be much improved by sending to well-established hospitals the injured employes, there to be treated by the regularly appointed surgeons of the road. The question of the importance of railway surgery has been agitated bv local, district and national asso-their railway surgeons, that in order to attain the highest order of professional service, i t was not only necessary to have an independent department, under the management of a competent chief surgeon, but in addition a well-organized and economically conducted hospital system that is prepared at all times to care for any class of injuries or illness that may occur in the operating of a railway system, with the least loss of time, the least permanent injury and the least expense, and the least suffering to the sick and wounded. It seems a strange, but a happy coincidence, that at the close of the nineteenth century, not only the leading railway surgeons, but also the leading military surgeons, have, from experience, arrived a t the same conclnsion: that to make a department strong and efficient it must be independent.