should be made, and if any weakness exist, it is advisable to employ preventive measures at once and not wait for developments as is so frequently done. An early application of a support or truss at this stage will prove of inestimable value and frequently prevent further injury. If further injury. If there be bulging of the affected muscles, brisk rubbing of the parts continued for a few minutes daily will materially strengthen them. It is an established fact that the tendency of hernias, if left to follow their own course, is to become worse and not better. and for the hernial rings to increase in size. The majority of inguinal hernias will also become scrotal. has become irreducible, no truss is of any benefit and he was advised at a hospital not to undergo the cutting operation. Life has become a burden and he is unable to earn a living at his former occupation. He remarked "For God's sake, Doctor, do something for me as I would rather be dead than continue to suffer as I do." I have another patient with hernia as large if not larger. At this writing I have not been successful in retaining them to my satisfaction. While extremely large hernias are seldom met with, I see so many frightful and horrible examples, see so much misery and suffering, hear of so many deaths from strangulation, hear of so many persons who come strangulated, more difficult to operate upon, and as a rule are not adapted to the injection treatment. I have been successful in reducing a number of irreducible hernias, even of long standing, by manipulation and continued pressure. A poorly fitting truss is of little benefit. I have seen as many cases of irreducible hernias when an unsuitable truss was being worn as when none had been used. Before selecting a truss care should be exercised to diagnose correctly the kind of hernia. If it be an indirect inguinal, the pad should extend upward beyond the internal ring and exert sufficient pressure at that point to prevent all escape into the canal. The French truss is used more frequently than any other. It is open to the objection that the greatest pressure is exerted over the external ring or pubic bone and liable to leave the internal ring unsupported. I have not seen a truss that is, in my opinion, best adapted to all cases. I have found the wire truss with a post which works on a ball and socket joint and enables pressure to be exerted at any angle or point to be the most satisfactory. Of the hard rubber truss, I prefer the "crossbody." The elastic truss is good but it is open to the objections that it soon becomes soiled, soon loses its elasticity and requires frequent adjusting. As most of them are made with only one strap which fastens at the top of the pad plate, in order to secure sufficient under pressure, the leg strap must be drawn uncomfortably tight. By having two straps attached to the body band which fasten at the top and bottom of the plate, it is possible to secure under pressure without the understrap being drawn tight. Many hernias can be retained by such an arrangement that could not be held by the other. Attention should also be paid to the shape of the pad, as a slight change will often enable a great difference in the effectiveness of the truss. To determine whether a truss is doing its work properly run a finger well under the edge of the pad while the patient is coughing, if marked impulse be felt it is not. Trusses do effect some cures but they are slow and uncertain in their action. The continued wearing of a truss with the pressure necessary to retain most hernias will cause marked absorption and atrophy of the under-lying structures so that if a cure were to be effected by said means, the affected muscles are liable to be so weakened as to again give way when all support is withdrawn. If other treatment is to be employed, the earlier it is begun the better. I know from personal experience that I would be more successful with my hernia cases by means of the plastic or tissue building treatment ( injection) if patients would undergo treatment before the parts have become absorbed and weakened by the previous wearing of a truss. In many instances it requires a longer time for the muscles to regain their former condition than is required to cure the hernia. The cutting operation and injection method are so successful that patients with hernia need not depend on a truss for relief and safety. 1418 Diamond Street, Philadelphia. REMARKS ON CHLORIDE OF SODIUM. BY BROSE S. HORNE, M. D. HERE can can no question but that many physicians have neglected to consider the great value of chloride of sodium in the treatment of disease. Investigations demonstrate that this substance is one of the most important in the human economy. It is present in every tissue and fluid in the body, and is the most prominent in assisting the diffusion of fluids through membranes. Without the assistance of salt, all functions would be suspended. Remove chloride of Sodium from the body and death results. The physiologists teach us that this salt promotes the endosmotic processes, also that it increases metabolism. Absorption cannot take place without it. Experiments show that it exists in combination with proteid bodies in the plasma of the blood. I firmly believe that chloride of sodium will be discovered by future experiments, to play a prominent part in producing what we term, vitality. By coming in contact with certain fluids and membranes of the body, there is a possibility,that certain human electric forces are set free that play no small part in producing life. Much of our physiological knowledge will be revised in the future. Osmosis may be found to be a mistake. Fluids do not pass through membranes as readily as many claim. Common salt by certain electro-chemic changes may lead us to believe, and know, from scientific demonstrations, that it, in combination with other substances, sets free certain powers that electrify the human body. There are many forms of electricity, the forms we use are crude. Every plant and every substance have stored up, within itself, a certain amount of electricity, received from the sun rays. The sun is electro-magnetic, in the strongest sense; its powers are in the electric waves that are sent out and received here on earth. The anima in our bodies when defined, possibly, is in itself a form of electric energy. Our manufactured electric currents, as far as their value for treatment are concerned, we find to be harsh, crude and shocking to molecular life. Could it not be possible that by certain changes, that the human body generates a form of electricity of its own? We are all concerned with the part chloride of sodium has to play, if any, in this great problem. We are more concerned with the medicinal value of this agent. Bossingault proved that the addition of common salt to the food of cattle greatly improved their condition. H. Dubief and A. Bolognesi, in Paris, 1894, demonstrated that tubercular empyema can be cured successfully by repeatedly washing out the pleural cavity with chloride of sodium, five drams to the quart of distilled water. "The washings are well tolerated, and during their use the patient remained apyretic, felt well, and had a good appetite; the kidneys operated normally, and the bodily weight increased." The result was a complete recovery. Salt is of value in many diseases. I will not take time to go into details as I 141 have done in another article. It is my RACE SUICIDE. BY C. E. BOYNTON, M. D. THE Free Thinkers, as appears by an article by one L. D. Crine in the Truth Seeker, take a rather singular view of the population question. The stand taken by Mr. Crine is that the world is populating too rapidly. It is his view that the human race would be much better off if reduced to ten million. Mr. Crine's view is a logical one for an atheist. With his opinion broadcast prevention of conception would be a benevolent work. It would prevent the new-born from entering an uncivilized, overcrowded and priest-ridden world. With no God fatherhood, with no hereafter or prenatal existence all there is to live for is the fleeting vista of this little and unsatisfactory life on earth. Human life viewed thus small would hardly be worth encouragement. On the contrary the writer chooses to look upon a human life upon this earth as a brief period of stress between two eternities; as one of a brotherhood more numerous than the stars. Man upon earth is to-day living upon a forced or crowded plain. Just now man's existence must be specified as "limited." Upon earth we are holding a position that we in some prior life, volunteered to occupy. Earth is no more man's home than is a bridge a place of residence. Atheism and its kindred isms all tend to belittle human life. Consider the first step in race suicide taken when effort is put forth to make the family smaller. The desire for small families once cultivated with the means at hand and every decade will show a smaller birth rate among those sit uated to put the contracept plan into operation. With no conscience to restrain measures of this character, child re-ring would gradually become more to be dreaded, and the task more shirked, even to possible race extermination. In fact when the first excuse is allowed for the willful killing of the ovum, another and another will follow, and every couple will be more willing to leave the rearing of a family to their neighbors than undertake it themselves. Willful destruction of the ova of the woman is very nearly the same thing as the extinguishment of embryonic life, and it seems hardly rational that one should be the terrible crime of murder if the other be an entirely innocent act. Supposing four children of four couple are to be, or should be. One is killed at birth (infanticide), another is killed in the fifth month (criminal abortion), another is destroyed the moment after the spermatozoa enters the ovum, the other dies the moment before the entrance. How do these destructions of life-willful, forethought destructions differ? The infanticide is murder, all will agree. The criminal abortion is worse inasmuch as the life of the mother has been endangered; though legally it is less of a crime. As to the other two acts I will leave them for the reader to moralize upon. The intent in both would be the same. The anti-population infidel apologist in his argument is almost treating infanticide as honorable. In this line of argument one can see where the mind that knows no God and no life but this, is tending. Woe to the world when the utopia of the atheist is realized. First ovacide as at present is no sin, next embryocide is allowable, then infanticide, then the killing off the "degenerates" until the egotistical remainder will regard every one outside of self a "degenerate." Therefore atheism and kindred isms given rope enough will hang themselves. Los Banos, Cal. The MEDICAL SUMMARY stands on its merits. Take it for a year and you will take it for life. WATER. BY BEN. H. BRODNAX, M. D. O universally distributed is this fluid that it would be almost impossible to find a substance in which it was not a part. In the body, I think, near three-fourths by weight is water. This being so, the necessity of a pure article with which to replace the loss daily, becomes apparent; at the same time the injury done by an impure fluid is very considerable. Disguised in various ways, tea, coffee, wine, liquors, several quarts finds its way into the stomach in the twenty-four hours, and are disposed of and thrown off by the breath, latent perspiration, urine and feces. This: is in a state of health; in disease it becomes also a medicinal agent of immense importance and very few conditions but call for its use in fevers as a drink and applied to the skin in various legrees of heat and cold! An old plan in colds is to immerse the feet in hot water, take some diaphoretic, wrap up warm in bed and sweat; as a medium in which to dissolve medicines and to wash out the general system. That this is salutary the writer knows from experience. A very common application is to the forehead in headache, and a common solution for this purpose South is passiflora incarnata, boiled or scalded, and the leaves wrapped in a fold of cloth and bound around the head or to the painful part. The tea is also drank and acts nicely to quiet pain. It is only quite recently that the immersion of the entire body in cold water for continued fever has been advocated by Dr. Rice, of New York. Pneumonia. seems to be the favorite condition in which it is claimed to produce strikingly good effect, but other fevers are said to be benefitted. Many years ago in a case of meningitis, in a girl eight years of age, I put her, hot with fever into a tub of rain water, pouring it from a large tin cup on the head, letting it run over the body, with effect of her returning in a minute or two, to consciousness and asking to be taken out as "it was cold." I kept her covered with: cloths wet in whiskey and water and fanned when the fever rose. She made a good recovery without any return of the coma. I am satisfied she would have died had not the intense fever been cooled down by this means. Tepid baths and sponging is a favorite mode of allaying bodily heat, and eruptions, and I am prepossessed in its favor and the fan as compared with the cold bath. This last should be tried if the cool or warm sponging and fan fail. Combined with this, the antipyretics of various kinds come in very pleasantly. As regards the all over cold bath, it is almost an impossibility to carry it out as laid down by its advocates in the country, owing to the absence of bath tubs, etc. Talking of warm baths I recollect putting a man, with a congestive chill, into a barrel of warm water up to his chin, with result of cure; he staid for an hour or more, refusing to get out. I have several times put young people into tubs and barrels for same purpose. It is certainly a very effective treatment. In congestion of stomach, with intense thirst, vomiting follows the use of cold water but not warm water. At same time water, cool but not iced, should be allowed in full quantity when well borne. In this respect the modern treatment of fevers is rational as compared with that of fifty odd years ago. This writer has some very feeling remembrances of the torture of thirst endured in those days. While we may at first not look favorably on the cold bath in some forms of continued fever, its use and that of ice in malarial troubles should be severely censured. Every one who has had the daily, and almost hourly, presence of these troubles before him knows that the sweat is the climax and much hoped-for period. It stands to reason that the application of cold water or ice to the throat, sides and abdomen of a malarial patient defers the hoped-for sweat period, and in every case that I have know it, the ice, being used, death has been the result. In all three cases, I am satisfied, had ordinary treatment been used, they would have recovered. Add to this the use of iced drinks, other than water, and we can see where trouble shows up. More particularly during and after eating. The stomach that has started out on the process of digestion must be at 98 degrees temperature or a little more. When chilled down to 40 degrees, must go back, warm the contents, and start afresh at its labors. This writer recollects a dance and supper, with ices and iced drinks that caused a rebellion within him, and for considerable time hot applications and sulphuric ether had to be brought to bear to produce comfort again. My old friend, Dr. Wm. H. Burgess, of Avondale, Tenn., reduces fat people at the rate of 5 to 15 pounds per month with Epsom salts... I part.. Water 16 parts Mix. Use as a sponge bath night and morning and take a teaspoonful of the mixture 3 times a day, and it does the work, Vichy Water of Germany does the same, but costs a little more. About 10 pounds Epsom salts to the proportion of water reduced a 278 pound preacher to 169 pounds in about 2 or 3 months. In congestion of stomach from malarial troubles, with intense thirst, water is vomited before it gets warm. The same thirst and vomiting shows up in inflammation of stomach when water is taken, but the diag nostic sign for distinction of the two troubles, is that in inflammation, mucus floats on the water vomited, while in the congestion preceding a chill, there is no mucus, but a little bile. This is a good point to remember, as the treatment is quite different. In inflammation silver nit., 2 to 3 grains in one oz. water, I teaspoonful repeated in half hour, checks it, while in congestive vomiting, 2 gr. doses of calomel every 15 minutes stops it. There is much more to be said of this all present fluid, but this will give some points for careful study. Brodnax, La. THE reading columns of the SUMMARY present a monthly epitome of practical medicine and therepeutics. If not a subscriber -subscribe now. |