abortive attacks by the greater lowering of temperature, by not being accompanied with disintegration of the blood-cells, nor by draining of the coloring matter out of the red bloed corpuscles—both of which changes I have seen in a drop of blood taken from the finger during an attack of abortive hemoglobinura.—Lancet.

DOUCHES AND LOTIONS.-Under the title of Douches and Lotions for the throat and nose, Dr. H. McNaughton Jones writes thus practically in the Practitioner:

To thoroughly wash the pharynx with a gargle in cases of follicular pharyngitis, tonsillar hypertrophy, and general pharyngeal relaxation, is frequently a most essential adjunct to more direct applications to the nose and nasopharynx. To get a patient to do this properly he should be made to lie down on his back, and keep the head low when gargling the throat. With a little education and practice he can learn how to force the fluid up behind the soft palate or eject it from the nostrils. The use of a nasal spray or douche is a much more satisfactory method of insufflating the nasal passages than the plan sometimes adopted of directing the patient to sniff up some medicated fluid. A small portable insufflator after the plan of Sass, which can be carried in the pocket and contains so much of the fluid or powder required, can be had for those who are traveling. I have never found any serious effects follow the use of the syphon nasal douche. I have occasionally had to abandon it in consequence of headache, frontal-ache, giddiness and ear-ache, resulting. This occurred only when permitting the stream to pass through from one nostril to the other by the usual method of holding the head forward. But I have found that such symptoms were more frequently due to imprudent and improper application of the douche, for they have disappeared when the following precautions were adopted: (1) The regulation of the force of the stream, the patient holding the vessel of fluid in the hand, raising or lowering it according as it is wished to increase or lessen the strength of the douche; (2) the maintenance of a proper temperature of the fluid (about 100°), the colder the douche the greater the risk of unpleasant results; (3) the avoidance of strong saline solutions; such concentrated fluids entering the Eustachian orifice may cause intra-tympanic inflammatory disturbances. act of douching, and for the moment or two it is better to direct the patient to suspend his breathing. Frequently it is not necessary to do more than allow the stream to pass from a height a little above the head into either nostril.

The mouth should be kept slightly open during the

I prefer to use all weak astringent, and disinfectant washes by means of the nasal spray, such as alum, tannic acid, sulpho-carbolate of zinc, chlorinated soda (3ii liquor. soda chlor. ad 3viii), chloride of zinc (gr. ii ad 3i), carbolic acid (gr. ii ad 3i), bichloride of mercury (1-2000), hazeline with infusion of matico (3i in 3vii), cocaine (with the special cocaine spray.) The more concentrated solution of glycerine and perchloride of iron (grs. xx-xxx ad 3i); the combination of aldehyde (2 pts.), and carbolic acid (1 pt.), glycerine (5 pts.), iodol or iodoform in ether (grs. xx-xxx ad 3i); chromic acid (grs. x-xx ad 3i), nitrate of silver (grs. x-xx ad zi) are best applied with the nasal probe and cotton-wool. The nares should be wiped clean with absorbent wool before any of these solutions are used. Should severe smarting follow the application and last any length of time, a warm alkaline stream should be passed through the nostrils. The powders for insufflation I find of most service in catarrhal conditions are those of iodoform (deodorized with fresh coffee, coumarine or vanilline), tannic acid, catechu, oxychloride of bismuth, and in tonsillar and throat congestions, guaiacum. The quantity of each may be regulated at from gr. ss to gr. i for each insufflation, powdered starch or lycopodium making an admirable basis. Fatty preparations serve in ulcerative states. I do not much care for greasy applications to the nasal membrane, but we can well apply in this manner iodoform or iodol, bismuth, belladonna, morphia, bichloride of mercury, the oxides of mercury, iodide of potassium, oxide of zinc, cocaine, the best medium of suspension being one part of vaseline and two parts of lard to four parts of lanolin. There can be no doubt that lanolin, diluted with lard, geoline, or vaseline, makes a capital absorbent basis for ointments. Iodol is the best substitute for iodoform, being quite devoid of its unpleasant odor and possessing all its properties without any of its toxic effects. I give this opinion of iodol from personal use of the drug.-Amer. Prac. and News.

THE RIGHTS OF SANITATION.-The time has arrived in this country for the stricter enforcement of a considerable body of miscellaneous santary law, and for the enactment and execution of the kind. This speciel of law, like all other law, has to struggle aganist ignorance, selfishnessi perverseness and wickedness. Underlying it will be found the wels defined principles of criminal law. If a man kills his neighbor the criminal law inflicts the same penalty on him whether he does the killing with poison, with a knife, with a club, or with a gun; but if he does the killing by means of beer poisoned with "multum," by means of a back

house in the basement of a building let to a tenant, by means of milk containing germs of scarlet fever, by means of pork containing trichinæ, by means of tea containing a "bloom" of black lead, by means of wallpaper colored with arsenical pigments, by means of wine "doctorhd" to taste by admixture of " plasterage," by means of a child sent to school bearing the contagion of deadly disease, by means of ships so crowded. between decks wirh emigrents that each person has less than thirty cubic feet of air space, by means of a theatre so constructed that even in case of alarm of fire a large percentage of the inmates are sure to be trampeled to death, by means of a hospital built in defiance of every hygienic law as a monument to civic ignorance and pride, by means of a deadly drug administered by pretentious quackery, then the enactors of statutes consider their constituencies and the elective magistrates look over their shoulder and out of the windows to observe the direction of the popurlar breeze. While it is very evident that public instruction must keep pace with law, it is also evident that malefactors who snap their fingers at preaching and teaching, can be reached only by the infliction of dreaded penalties. The world can never be reformed by moral suasion alone. Immanuel Kant, the most vigorous ethical soul in modern times, says: "When a man has made worm of himself, he cannot complain if he is trampled under foot." If tenants whose humble homes have been visited by the angel of death, the sanitary delinquency of a landlord, instead of passively submitting to their fate would mob him and throw him into the stagnant pool under the building that he has refuseed to drain, or into the reeking cess-pool that he has refused to clean, it would do more good than the best hygienic track on sewer-gas ever written. If a thousand emigrants after escaping from the foul dungeons of an ocean steaner, would turn around and abate the nuisance by burning it up, and there is some color of law for such a proceeding, it would do more public good than any other of Congress, winked at by morally stupid official. If the proprietor of an "Orange County Dairy," known to be distributing milk from premises infected with small-pox, scarlatina, diphtheria, or typhoid fever, along a street where crape on many a door already indicates the sad fruits of his deadly trade, were set upon by an outraged communiuy and hung on the nearest lamp-post, instead of being arraigned before a magistrate aud perhaps fined ten dollars and cost, the summary proceeding would absolutely infuse a healthy ethical vigor into the makers and administrators of law. The public need to be told again, in the trenchant language of Kant: "Let not your rights be trampled under foot by others unpunished." As long as we have a "stump-tail" state of ethics, hygienic questions, in the community, too rotten and feeble to beget sanitary indignation, we shall have plenty of interested men to trample uncomplaining worms under foot.-O. W. WIGHT, of Detroit, in the Sanitarian.

GERMS AND PTOMAINES.-In concluding his paper before the French Academy of Medicine, Prof. Peter made the following remarks:"M. Gauthier has shown that in the dead body, and even in the living, ptomaines are found; these alkaloids, ptomaines or leucomaines, are absolutely toxic; an auto-infection, characterized by hyperthermia, is the result. This theory rids us, at least for a time, of the tyranny of the microbes. If urea, which is an alkali, is constantly formed in our organism, why should there not also be formed an alkaloid in it? It is only a question of degree. Life is a contingent phenomenon ; it is a serial of partial deaths. It may therefore be said that we carry

in ourselves, while living, a portion of our own corpse, but we resist the work of auto-infection by two distinct mechanisms-the elimination of the toxic substance and its destruction by oxygen. We should no longer hesitate between the parasitic doctrines, which are shrouded in dark hypotheses, and this new doctrine, which is as luminous as it is precise, which explains the phenomena of normal and abnormal life.”— Lancet.

BROMIDIA.-The following remedy is one which has been used for some time by my colleague (Dr. Proudfoot) and myself, and I give the results:

About eighteen months ago a friend of mine from America told me of the wonderful effects of a medicine, much used in the States, called Bromidia. According to the makers, it is composed of chloral hydrate, fifteen gr.; potassium bromide, fifteen gr. ; extract of cannabis indica, one-eighth gr.; and extract of hyoscyamus, one-eighth gr. I obtained some, and have ordered it regularly for over a year; and have found it excellent in the pain of rheumatism, pneumonia, and cancer; also in the sleeplessness of scarlatina and alcoholism. It has never failed me in procuring sleep, without the disagreeable dreams and after-effects of opium. The dose is 3ss. to 3j. every hour till sleep is procured. I have also found it of much service in cases of tonsillitis, used as a gargle with glycerine and carbolic acid.—). Lindsay Porteous, M. D., F. R. C. S., M. R. C. P., Ed., in Edinburgh Med. Journal.

A SIMPLE REMEDY FOR CHRONIC DIARRHEA.-T. C. Smith, M. D., of Aurora, Indiana, highly recommends drachm doses, three or four times daily, of a saturated solution of common salt in cider vinegar in the treatment of chronic diarrhea.

A FEW FALLACIES.- Perhaps the formulation of a few popular fallacies may not be without interest to our readers at this time, even if they be indisposed to accept the statements without some qualification.

It is a fallacy to suppose:

That alcoholic drinks support physical strength during excessively hot weather.

That seasonable weather is ever unhealthy.

That men and women should eat the same kind and amount of food when their manner of life is entirely different.

That pie is really indigestible; or, in general, that the quality of indigestibility can be logically affirmed of any article of food absolutely and apart from a consideration of the digestive capacity of the particular stomach the powers of which are to be tested.

That disease, in any given case, consists simply in the group of symptoms complained of by the patient, or morbid signs detected by the physician.

POST-MORTEM TRANSFUSION OF ARSENIC.-It has been shown that arsenic injected into the stomach after death can pass to the liver and neighboring viscera, but it has been doubted that the processes of transfusion could carry arsenic so injected to the brain, and in general it has been assumed that the hydrogen sulphide produced during decomposition converts arsenic into insoluble sulphide, thus preventing transfusion.

F. S. Sutton has made injections of three grains of arsenious oxide into the stomach and rectum of dogs that had been killed by chloroform twenty-four hours previously. After burial during a time varying from three to one hundred and two days, arsenic could be detected in the liver, kidneys, and brain, and the longer the lapse of time the more arsenic was present in the brain. Scolosuboff's statement that arsenic is deposited in the brain only during life, and that the presence of arsenic in the brain is conclusive evidence that it was absorbed during life, is consequently untrustworthy.-Medical Times.

NEW SIGN OF DEATH.-M. Lessenne, at a meeting of the Societe Medicale d'Amiens, indicated a certain sign of death, simple and trustworthy. After pricking the skin with a needle, the puncture remains open, just as when a piece of leather is pricked. On the living body, even if the blood does not come to the surface, as would happen if the person were hysterical, the pin-prick closes at once, and does not leave the slightest trace. Brit. Med. Journal,