ice may be required. Where heat is used, care must be taken not to blister the skin as from its enervated state severe sores may be formed without the patient's knowledge. When the disease has been caused by alcohol, entire abstinence must be enforced, or recovery is impossible. The withdrawal of stimulants cannot in all cases be accomplished immediately, or the patient may succumb to heart failure. Alcohol is, however, a most potent poison in these cases, and although taken in small quantities may bring back all the original symptoms when the patient is almost restored. In all cases it is essential, if possible, to learn the cause and remove this; else all treatment may prove unavailing. The diet must be simple and unstimulating.

Electricity plays an important part in this disease; but care must be taken as to the form and time of its administration. If given during the stage of intense pain it may aggravate all the symptoms. When the pain has become modified, a mild constant galvanic current should be applied to the degenerated nerve, the current being passed through the nerve in either direction, or in both alternately. When atrophy has occurred, the faradic current and gentle, carefully applied massage will greatly aid in restoring the affected parts.

The homeopathic remedies which we have found most often curative are aconite, actea rac., agaricus, arnica, arsenicum alb., belladonna, bellis perennis, bryonia, hypericum, phosphorus, and rhus tox.

AÇONITE.-Numbness, coldness, formication, sharp, shooting, tearing pains in the limbs and joints. Aggravation at night; worse from midnight to 3 A. M.; great restlessness and uneasiness; pains unbearable; great anguish with moaning and groaning.

This remedy has been very efficacious in our experience. Especially indicated in the acute stage when disease has been caused by exposure to the cold.

ACTEA RACEMOSA.-Severe aching in arms and legs; numbness as if the nerves were being compressed; excessive muscular soreness of limbs; sleeplessness, or sleep disturbed by unpleasant dreams. More often indicated in alcoholic cases than any other drug.

AGARICUS.-Burning and itching of hands and feet; parts red, hot and swollen, as if frozen; cramps in hands and feet; trembling and twitching of muscles of hands and feet; powerlessness and great weariness; restless, disturbed sleep.

ARNICA.-Pains in arms and hands, legs and feet; soreness all over as if parts had been bruised.

Especially indicated in traumatic cases.

ARSENICUM.-Burning, tearing pains in limbs. Pains shooting from fingers up the arms into shoulders; swelling of feet and hands; great restlessness and uneasiness, worse at night, relieved by heat. Especially indicated in severe forms of multiple neuritis.

BELLADONNA.-Intense, almost unbearable, paroxysmal pains in affected nerves; great sensitiveness of parts to touch; cannot bear even weight of bed clothes; sleeplessness; pains relieved by warmth.

BELLIS PERENNIS.-This has in our experience proven, perhaps, more often curative than almost any other remedy, when there is great soreness of the nerves with intense pain. In cases where arnica seemed indicated but did no good, bellis perennis has many times given prompt and permanent relief.

BRYONIA. Tearing, piercing, stitching, cutting pains, aggravated by motion; oversensitiveness of all senses; aching cramplike pains; limbs swollen, red and sensitive to touch; relief from hard pressure and cold applications.

HYPERICUM.-Especially indicated in traumatic cases where the nerves have been torn and lacerated and the patient suffers sharp, cutting pains along the course of the nerve terminating in a twisting, wrenching sensation in the foot.

PHOSPHORUS.-This remedy may be needed in chronic cases when degeneration has taken place and its individual symptoms are present.

RHUS TOX:-Tearing, drawing, shooting, throbbing pains with numbness and sense of pressure and loss of power in limbs affected; great restlessness; aggravated by rest and cold; relieved by continued motion and heat.

Especially indicated when disease has been caused by getting wet. In addition to the remedies mentioned, aesculus, berberis, calcarea carbonica, dulcamara, natrum sulph. and veratrum album have given excellent results when their individual symptoms were present.

THE TREATMENT OF MALIGNANT NEOPLASMS.

TH

BY J. E. GILMAN, M.D.,

Professor of Materia Medica, Hahnemann College, Chicago, Ill.

HE steps downward in the course of degenerative diseases are well understood and delineated in text-book after text-book. But in the retrograde of recovery from cancer we find no record of complete cures from which to draw helpful information.

Heretofore, cancer has conveyed the terror of a death sentence to the afflicted one, but with the present age we have the promise of rational treatment, which will reduce the mortality of cancer to an insignificant matter. For many months, now running into years, I have been treating cancer with such a degree of success, that I am confident of the value of the methods employed and of its application to all forms of the cancer family, in all locations, and to all stages of it, under certain limitations.

From my experience I have divided the applicants for treatment into three classes. The first one I know I can cure without any hesitancy. I can assure the patient that the trouble can be removed with a degree of certainty, that may relieve him of all fear for the future. This class embraces all the nodules, indurations and engorgements, out of which spring the malignant growths, external and internal, in their earlier stages-the slow growing forms, even when of considerable extent and of considerable duration, and the more easily reached external invasions, such as some of the epitheliomas and lupus, or what are termed "skin cancers." In this stage the surgeon who raises a knife to mutilate the human body by the excisions of any of these nodules, commits a crime; and I say it advisedly, as I believe that all of the cases of so-called surgical cures, are no more or less than the removal of harmless adenomas, which have no tendency to recur, while the malignant forms always do return, and return with increased violence. The most that can be said for the surgical treatment of carcinoma in its earlier stage is that it will postpone in some cases the terrible fate which is sure to come sooner or later. The second division of cases include those in whom cancer has made so much progress that general infection is impending, but not yet taken place. . There are no metastases to in

ternal, vital organs; although the invasion of the disease may be very considerable in extent and increasing.

To those patients I can say: "I think I can remove this trouble. I do not know it; but I believe I can." While the third class includes the refuse and sweepings of the surgeon's butchery, after he has excised every tissue which might be removed with a possibility of life being maintained. Or those neglected cases where the secretiveness of the patient or some other cause, such as a rapid growth, has allowed the neoplasm to reach such proportions that more or less extensive glandular infection has taken place and the cancer dominates the individual. To these I can only say I will do the best I can for you, but can promise you nothing.

For twenty years I have for certain reasons had my attention directed to the medical treatment of cancer, and for years up to certain limits have felt confident of favorable results; but beyond these limitations the disease would baffle me; but when in the course of my experiments with the X-ray in 1896-97 and ensuing years, I found that the effect on carcinoma was very great, and that I could with its use undertake with confidence cases which I should have before considered hopeless, I believed I could control the disease at any stage. But in this belief I could not remain; as a number of fatal cases convinced me that the treatment had its limitations still and was not an absolute panacea in all cases of the severe forms in advanced stages. Yet, I had been able to carry through successfully some cases which had been pronounced absolutely hopeless; so I did not feel that I could refuse the treatment to even those desperate cases, as it would modify and give relief even when it failed to stay the ravages of the disease.

My first cases were internal. One, a cancer of the liver, the next two of the pancreas; the fourth one, of the liver again. Then some of the kind the surgeons delight to operate on, and then a case of scirrhus of the extensive character as described in the third division of cases. This case was reported in the columns of the Clinique and seen by quite a number of physicians at different stages of improvement. Then I submitted many cases to the test, and during the past three or four years, more than two hundred cases have passed through my hands. After one special case had been spread broadcast through the papers to the world, I was overwhelmed with inquiries from patients who were almost at the last stage of disease progression; and I took a large number of these cases, which increased the ratio of deaths. I think all of the deaths were in this class of cases; all others being quite cured or in a fair way to be.

But even with these odds against me, the ratio of deaths is not greater than the average mortality from typhoid fever, while with the taking of the two first classes or divisions of which I spoke in the first of this paper, not one per cent. would be lost.

When I made the statement that cancer was curable by medical agency fortified by the X-ray, it was met by shouts of incredulity from many of the medical profession. But facts are stubborn things to throw overboard; and one after another experimenter in the field has since been delighted with the results of the X-ray work.

At first, even among those operators, it was believed that only that hanger on to the outskirts of carcinoma, lupus, could be benefitted. Nothing else, and not sure here of anything. Then admissions were made that epithelioma might be helped, while lupus was very satisfactory under treatment. Then surface and skin diseases. were admitted as possibilities; but internal ones never. Yet, my first cases were internal cancers, and from the penetrating character of the X-ray, I do not see how logically its power to control internal -cancer can be questioned.

Take a sensitized plate, place it at the back of the patient, in front of him place a two-inch plank, in front of the plank a Webster's unabridged dictionary; through all of this the X-rays will penetrate with ample force to imprint on the plate the radiograph of the bones of the body perfectly, and will if continued longer produce the X-ray burn, and will also cause chemical reactions.

If the X-ray will induce cell changes externally, why, logically, with this power of penetration, can it not affect in the same manner internal organs? I know from many cases that it can, and does, do this, and that its power of benefitting cancer is extended internally as well as externally.

Gradually the very men who at first doubted the scope of the X-ray treatment are now giving adherence to the statement I made of its value in the treatment of all forms of carcinoma.

As to the etiology of the disease, I believe the origin of the cancerous disease is largely from imperfect excretion of the sewage or excess nutrition of the body. The lymphatics failing in activity an enlarged gland results, and unless the collateral circulation affords relief, it increases (as an obstruction in a stream gathers drift), until a tumor of sufficient size is formed to create irritation. This is the beginning of the degeneration. It accounts for the greater readiness of cancer to develop at the menopause. Is there a germ of cancer or not? I am not now quite as ready to think there is as I was at first, the chief argument against it being the absolute non-con