The present article, suggested by the excellent statistics of medical education published annually by The Journal, is a cold-blooded statistical study of certain problems of supply and demand, bearing quite directly on the ultimate bread-and-butter problem of the profession. Let us start with some statistics from the U. S. Census:
Roughly speaking, the ratio of physicians to population is about the same as of white to red corpuscles in the blood, but with a moderate leucocytosis.
In the thirty years from 1870 to 1900, the population nearly doubled. In the same period the number of physicians more than doubled; in fact, it increased to about 212 per cent. of its former number. To put it in another way, the average physician had a clientele which was less than in 1870 by 50 persons, or about 10 families. Not only was the clientele smaller, but it included a larger proportion of