IT is quite evident to any one who has practised medicine—and especially radiology— for any considerable time, that insurance against and indemnity guarantee for malpractice lawsuits is almost as necessary as is a license to practise. Malpractice suits are unusually distasteful because they are attacks upon our professional reputations, and reflections upon the entire medical profession as well as— most especially—upon the defendant in the case. Medical malpractice is usually understood to mean unskillful practice or negligence on the part of the physician, when as the result of such unskillful or bad practice or negligence, death ensues, or the health, efficiency, or appearance of the patient is impaired. Thus, malpractice may be willful, negligent or ignorant, and in some cases criminal as well as civil suits may be brought. Civil suits for the recovery of damages on account of injuries supposed or alleged to have been experienced as the result of willful negligence or of ignorance, are very common, and, unfortunately, cases depending upon alleged X-ray burns for the cause of the damage are becoming more and more frequent as the number of X-ray machines multiply and persons of more or less (usually less) experience and familiarity with their operation and with their effects, undertake to employ them. In practically all other kinds of injury, error, or even apparently gross negligence, there may be found some plausible way out of the difficulty; but when an X-ray burn appears as the cause of the injury, things always look bad for the doctor who produced it. It is true that the presence of an X-ray burn is very seldom a good and sufficient reason for charging malpractice, because we, as physicians, have every possible incentive to do the best we can for every patient with whom we come in contact. Our reputations and our very living depend upon this, even if our humanitarian instincts did not so guide us. When suits are brought for alleged malpractice and damage resulting from X-ray burns, the number of verdicts against the defendants who inflicted the alleged burns are many times more than all the other verdicts for damages, in proportion to the relative numbers of suits brought, and likewise (he verdicts rendered by courts and juries in X-ray burn cases are for larger amounts than are those for the ordinary run of medical malpractice cases. With these indisputable facts and figures staring us in the face, is it not easy to see why some of the insurance corporations refuse altogether to insure X-ray workers against malpractice? Is it not equally clear why those insurance organizations who are willing to carry our risks against malpractice suits must charge the X-ray worker more than they charge the physician who does not use the X-rays at all? It seems to me that it is exactly parallel to making a fifty-year-old man pay more than a twenty-five-year-old man for a thousand dollar life insurance policy.