The author has gleaned from twenty-five years' experience in a surgical and medical industrial service, with admissions exceeding 11,000 patients per year, a practical groundwork for a discussion of various occupational diseases. The patients admitted represented such diverse sources as chemical, mechanical, general manufacturing industries, agriculture, cattle raising, meat packing, fishing, canning, shipbuilding and airplane construction. Since patients were, to a large extent, referred by physicians in a number of localities, with a previous estimate of their condition and medicolegal status, the author has had an opportunity to obtain a cross section of the existing viewpoint among industrial physicians and general practitioners with regard to the purpose of compensation, as well as a chance to note the phases of industrial medicine not understood by members of the medical profession at large. For example, he states he is impressed with the fact that a scientific basis for diagnosis of the more