do the classic drops of morphine and cocaine. Dover's powder, thanks to the ipecac it contains, may also meet the requirements of an irritable gastric myasthenia.

When there is no fear of any pain, we may stimulate the hyposthenic digestion with a hot infusion of angelica root, given after each meal, with the addition of some stenol [a compound of caffeine and theobromine]. This will clear up the most troublesome phosphatic urine. To quiet the sensitiveness and contraction either of the cardia or pylorus, in case of dysphagia, we may prescribe 100 Grams of warm olive oil (3 ounces, about) flavored with anise oil, to be taken three-fourths of an hour before every meal. This I think superior to any stupefying remedy. DR. E. MONIN, in La Dosimetrie, March, 1911, p. 39.

(To be Continued)

AGAINST PNEUMONIA IN OLD AGE

Oppenheim and Cropin (Tribune Méd., 1910, p. 646) used oil of camphor, 20 percent, subcutaneously, in senile pneumonia, in large doses. They gave twice daily 5 Cc. (80 minims) injected under the skin of the abdomen. Unpleasant side-effects were not observed, in spite of the large doses. The breath had a decided odor of camphor. Sixteen persons were treated in this way, seven of whom succumbed to the disease. With one exception, a woman 76 years old, the ages of all the rest were above seventy.-Wiener Medizin. Wochenschrift.

COLCHICINE

A curious instance comes to us from Paris, of the slowness with which medical thought adapts itself to new ideas.

Robin, discussing the treatment of gout, expressed a preference for a French preparation made from the flowers of colchicum. His reason was that the quantity of colchicine contained in the seed varied from year to year. This was not the case with the flowers, and a tincture made from them had the advantage of constant composition and stability.

Strangely enough, it did not seem to occur to the great man that the easiest way of getting rid of this difficulty was to use the active principle itself, colchicine. This is the more remarkable, since in the same lecture he spoke favorably of the use of this principle. It is hard for men, when they have passed a certain age, to form new habits or get out of the ruts they have worn for themselves.

NITRITE POISONING CAUSED BY

BISMUTH SUBNITRATE

A study was made recently of bismuth poisoning occasioned by bismuth subnitrate. The reduction of the nitrate to the nitrite is due to the agency of certain reducing bacteria, and that process takes place in the lower portion of the intestine. In certain postmortem examinations it was noticed with surprise that all the bismuth taken had passed the small intestine and accumulated in the colon.

The toxic symptoms occur after a latent period of some hours and then reach their acme in a short time in the shape of vomiting, great debility, diarrhea, cyanosis, methemaglobin in the blood, and these followed either by death or by complete recovery in a relatively short time. These experiences make it imperative to use in x-ray practice some bismuth combination which is slightly soluble and lacks the nitrate components.— Berlin Klin. Wochenschr., in Pharm. Centralh., 1910, p. 1070.

OBSTRUCTED DELIVERY

Dr. Prüsmann, in the Münchener Medizinische Wochenschrift (1910, p. 41), reports the case of a woman who, instead of a vagina, has only a narrow passage of the dimensions of a male urinary catheter, 7 1-2 inches in length, this canal opening on the left side. In place of the vulva there is a large cicatrix which extends up to the symphysis pubis. An excretory urethral duct is not to be seen anywhere. The urethra appears to open somewhere into the narrow canal above the cicatrix. The patient is 28 years old. She says that when she was six years old she was run over by a freight wagon and that one of its

wheels passed exactly between her thighs. She was sick in bed with fever for three months. There was no impediment to walking when she recovered. The urine and the menstrual discharge issued from the narrow opening mentioned. After five years of a sterile marriage she became pregnant, to her own and her husband's great astonishment, for regular coitus could, of course, never have taken place.

In view of the anatomical situation, it is evident that the spermatozoa must have passed the 7 1-2 inches long canal to the portio vaginalis uteri by their own power of motion. It is true that pregnancy is known to have taken place in case of an unperforated hymen, yet it can be assumed that in such cases the sperm was thrown mechanically into the upper part of the vagina.

Prüsmann followed the operation advised by Latzko. He made a pan-handle incision, then pushed the peritoneum by blunt dissection from the left toward the median line of the cervix, cut through the uterus sideward. from the median line, and delivered a living boy weighing 5 4-5 pounds.

CONGENITAL LOCAL APLASIA OF THE

THORAX-WALL

At a meeting of the Societé Médicale des Hôpitaux, Drs. Apert and Buc presented a man whose left side of the chest was reduced to a double plane of skin of fibrous consistency. The third and fourth ribs together with their costal cartilages were missing in their anterior portions. The fifth rib was deflected downward and the second deflected upward. The grand pectoral was reduced to its clavicular and manubrial bundles. The small pectoral was wanting. The left nipple was half the size of the right one and deviated upward and inward.

We are confronted here by a malformation which has been observed in all degrees from the absence of the pectorals only up to the absence of all layers except that of the skin, with a subcutaneous hernia of the lung. In 25 percent of the cases there is also a lesion in the extremities, the fingers, on the same. side. In some of these cases the hand is found in the place of the pectoral depression, a fact which permits of attributing the mal

formation to a presence of the hand on that side during an early period of embryonic existence. Gaz. des Hop. 1910, p. 89.

FUNCTION OF THE OMENTUM

Charcoal suspended in physiologic salt solution and injected into dogs or guinea-pigs collects in the omentum. We can see microscopic heaps of phagocytes which have taken up these small foreign bodies. The same phenomena can be observed when injecting powdered magnetic iron ore, when its accum

ulation in the omentum can be observed radiographically in surviving animals. We can also demonstrate the absorptive action of the omentum on iron particles by observing, in a recently killed animal, how a magnet will not attract so readily iron particles which are scattered on the omentum as it does from an intestinal loop. Larger bodies also, such as glass beads, pieces of cork or of lead, when put into the peritoneum, become enmeshed and encapsulated by the omentum. Heavier particles, lead for instance, become detached after encapsulation, and with the piece of omentum about them are lodged anywhere in the abdominal cavity. The same process goes on in the case of the broad ligaments in the true pelvis.-F. and P. Heger, in Gaz. Med. Belge, through Wien. Med. Woch, 1910, col. 51.

PANTOPON AND SCOPOLAMINE

Bruestlein of Berne (The Lancet) proposes pantopon and scopolamine as a substitute for the volatile anesthetics. Many patients were walked into the operating room in a semiconscious condition and then were operated upon without ether. Some required a little ether, though. The results described are those following the use of H-M-C.

BULLETINS ON NATIVE DRUG PLANTS

Those interested in American drugs should send to the Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Plant Industry, for Bulletins No. 107 and No. 189. The former describes a number of American crude drug-plants, giving plates by which they should be easily identified. The other treats of dioscorea.

path or eclectic societies, how would he be met? A sunny, patronizing smile would flit over allo's face: "Thanks, awfully, but you know I am a busy man and I can hardly get time to attend the regular meetings." Not a face-not a face-of these "superior ducks" would ever gladden the doors of those beguiled simpletons belonging to the other schools.

Like that other orthodox, known as the Roman, we should be glad to have all Christendom united in the true faith, but, then, there is only one that is the true

one ours.

Now, I am sure for one, and I am equally confident that most homeopaths and eclectics will join me in the statement, that we should be very glad to have them join us, and we feel that they would be very good practitioners if they would only learn something of the practical use of medicine. It is just the idea, that "the truth is all ours," held by the dominant school, that has been the means of creating the Thomases, Tildens, Christian scientists, and all the rest.

3. I am surprised also to note that this journal advocates the issuing of this matter in pamphlet form, for I mind me that a man of iron will and energy plus to back it started a crusade against his groovechasing apathetic allopath brethren to jar them into something besides opium, calomel, quinine, and iodine. This man's name is Abbott, and he launched alkalometry in America, and this man has done more than any other man in America to clear his school of the just charge of dryrot. He didn't want them to get very far away either, just to give something that had something definite in view in the matter of curing disease and with some understanding of how to apply remedies to meet definite disease-conditions. A hunch, by the way, first put into practice by the eclectics, who in turn got their idea from the Thomsonians.

It is almost superfluous to add that this man was jumped on and called a heretic and honored with the cognomen that is always used by the orthodox to designate a progressive thinking man"Quack." I have not forgotten the fight

of 1907-08, when this same A. M. A. frothed, fumed and raged against the H-M-C anesthetic and abuse of billingsgate variety was heaped upon the heads of this man and his solid brother, Waugh. I have in my possession a letter from one of these men, in reply to one I wrote, in which I suggested that, if the mossbacks did not stop their work, the public be appealed to. I do not remember the exact wording of this letter, but it was in effect that it might yet be necessary to reach laymen.

Right here let me say, the public can be relied upon to give the right verdict in the end, even if they make mistakes, and they need no paternalistic guardianship. Mr. Allopath, if you have a grain of sense, you can see that you have that verdict in the demand for progress, shown by the new methods of treating disease. Had you not been blinded by the belief that you were the last word, there would never have been Eddyism or any of the dozen other ilks. While Mrs. Eddy in the main was a faker, she has, just the same, been one of the Martin Luthers that opened the way out of four hundred years of Galenism. 4.

Now let us see about that halftruth as to the "stupid public" being incompetent to judge whom it shall have as a medical adviser. For the sake of being more than fair, I will take Dr. Robinson's own illustration of appendicitis or peritonitis-diffused pain in the abdomenand contrast what would be done by a grandson of a Thomsonian-the eclecticwith the practice of the four hundred-yearsago galenic-the allopath. Dr. Robinson, in this illustration, however, really has half reversed the proceedings; for if there is one thing the allopath is ever ready with, it is the "hypo"-to relieve pain, he uses it in season and out of season. (I am not including dosimetrists, for they are only halfbreeds.)

In comes Mr. Allopath with his "expectant" method and leaves his patient practically where he found him (with sad images of grave possibilities) and one day wasted, for many times the intelligent use of remedies will half cure a patient in that time; and I make no exaggerated statement in saying that I have known of cases

going on under such methods, wasting time to unearth a Latin name to apply to it, till the patient has gone beyond recovery -and I believe that in last year's CLINIC there appeared several articles on this same subject.

Comes Mr. Grandson of a Thomsonian. This man seldom uses his hypodermic, but he has a definite weapon that will hit pain in the belly ninety times out of one hundred; he pops a dose of dioscorea or some other indicated remedy, of which he has many, into his sick man; orders it repeated every fifteen minutes till the pain stops; orders a high enema; takes a sample of the urine and a blood-smear, to go on with his diagnosis; and tells his patient not to be alarmed. It is "dollars to doughnuts" that by the next day the patient is half cured, for we all know that 95 percent of all socalled cases of appendicitis are operated upon unnecessarily.

It is only two years ago that a German investigator in Berlin proved that in 1500 cases treated, 95 percent of the patients recovered under intelligent treatment, without operation, and I am quite sure that an account of his findings was published in this journal. Dr. Robinson will surely recognize this as "authority" for the rank and file of allopaths, as it is notorious that the great bulk of synthetic compounds and mixtures generally come to them from Germany; in fact, without the German stamp of approval, your orthodox looks askance at anything claiming recognition.

5. Here is a poser for CLINIC readers; yea, verily, doth it blur the eyes of the homeopath and eclectic quacks, for it showeth not the jewel of consistency as one of the editor's gems, if he advocates spreading such stuff broadcast through the land.

Listen: "To take one more example from pneumonia," says Dr. R., "some of you possibly know that pneumonia, when fully established, is what we call a self-limited disease; that is, it runs its course and cannot be cut short or interrupted by drugs or other methods of treatment." I will not finish the quotation, for he goes on to state that it ends itself by the seventh day, and how the other fellow is called in about this

time and he gets the credit of cure, and so on. Read it yourself.

I might add much that any intelligent thinker knows, but I forbear, as I am not trying to write a book on "Why the homeoeclecto-osteo-chiro-Eddy came to exist." I just wish here to show you the inconsistency of CLINICAL MEDICINE in publishing such a pamphlet. Helpful Hints is filled with glowing accounts of how pneumonia and typhoid fever are being jugulated, and circulars without number have been issued, showing the merry war on this disease, redounding to the glory of dosimetry; and there have not been a dozen issues of this journal in the nine years I have taken it that such articles have not appeared from the pens of the editing staff, as well as from hundreds of physicians of repute from all parts of the country.

Far be it from me to belittle these circulars, pamphlets, etc., reports on dosimetry; for, as an eclectic, although a grandson of Thomsonism, I am also a staunch supporter of the good in active-principle therapy, as I believe it represents the first step away from orthodox allopathy; just as Eddyism has helped to open the eyes of Christendom to something better than hell-fire and brimstone.

6. What Dr. Robinson says of patent medicine and foods in the main is true; yet the glory of that conquest cannot be ascribed solely to the efforts of medical men, by the wildest flights of imagination, taking in all the recognized schools of medicine, for the very good reason that there are hundreds of workers who never saw the inside of a medical school, who have worked for these laws. In fact, most of the progress of moment to the lay public has not been due to medical largess; in truth, most of the discoveries have been due to men who never practised medicine at all, even down to the germ-theory. The progress of medicine, like its religious brother, has always been due to the knocks from the outside; for, be it said to their shame, when one of their number does have a thought aside from "authority," he is promptly jumped on and "quacked" or else excommunicated.