WANTED: A PROPER ACCOUNTING OF FREE MEDICAL SERVICE

To the Editor:  —Although the annual reports of hospitals are valuable sources of information concerning certain hospital activities, they are strangely silent in relation to one of the major aspects of hospital service; namely, the gratuitous service of physicians which is bound up with ordinary hospital practice. Those who have been identified with hospital administration and have shared in the preparation of hospital reports know that the omission is due to thoughtlessness and not to any desire to conceal a vital fact in medicosocial economics. Nevertheless, it is high time for hospitals to mend their ways.I shall not attempt here to discuss the question whether the members of active staffs of hospitals and dispensaries are sufficiently rewarded for their services in the free wards and the dispensary by the enhancement of their professional prestige, by privileged access to research laboratories, by preferential right to the use of rooms for