fees to Ottawa.

An executive of three or four for each province does not appear to fill the required end.

Speaking of organizations and associations, and the many of these we have in Canada, emphasizes strongly the fact that the Canadian Medical Association, the national and the parent organization, should be re-organized with provincial, city and county branches. We would have then, for instance, the existing provincial societies as provincial branches. The city societies could be made city branches, and the county societies, where these existed, could be made county branches, or branches established in every county. Thus could the medical profession all over the country become thoroughly organized, and be of untold service not only to itself, but would make the Canadian Medical Association an organization of a great deal of importance. It would also be sure to benefit in great measure the Canadian Medical Protective Association. It would help on those reforms which are required so much, the establishment of a Public Health Department and Dominion Registration. It could pronounce authoritatively for the medical profession of the Dominion of Canada upon all matters of medical policy pertaining to that profession. There must be in each county medical men progressive enough to organize these branches and keep them going. Say, for instance, the Oxford County Branch of the Canadian Medical Association be formed. No doubt most of the medical men in Oxford would join that branch. The constitu

tion could be so framed that a member of a county branch would be as well a member of the provincial branch, in this case, the Ontario Medical Association Branch, or the Ontario Branch of the Canadian Medical Association, and so a member of the national organization. All fees, which ought to be at least $5 per annum, could be collected each year by the county branches, which should hold monthly or bi-monthly meetings. One dollar of this could be retained by the county branch, $2 forwarded to the provincial branch, and $2 to the national association. This reorganization would keep alive. the present existing societies, and would not antagonize any of them. Communications on this subject for publication are. solicited.

Editorial Notes.

Chloroform at Sixty."- No reflective man reaches his meridian without realizing the value and sacredness of human life in its general sense as well as in its individual manifestation. The profession of medicine stands as the guardian of human life, and it is something of a shock to even the most careless that a representative of the profession should speak in favor of shortening the term of life as a routine measure. The AngloSaxon race particularly is exacting in its standards of dignity, sympathy, and insight for the physician, in its demands that he individualize, not generalize, in his measures. An utterance from a leader in the profession reflecting on the usefulness of existence beyond a certain period comes with depressing force to the sensitive, reacts with doubt and distrust upon the general profession. As a serious utterance it would be pessimistic in its every tendency; as a jest it is foreign to the genius of the profession, worthy only of the professional joker or the notoriety seeker. Dr. Osler, of course, cannot be classed under either of these categories, and it is peculiarly unfortunate, just on the eve of his departure from America to take one of the leading medical professorships in Great Britain, that a public utterance of his should be distorted by newspaper "enterprise" apparently to signify depreciation of human age-value. We have not seen the text of the address, but Dr. Osler telegraphs us: "Contradict, please, in American Medicine, that I advised chloroform for men at sixty. Wm. Osler." The sympathy of all physicians who respect the dignity of their profession and appreciate the value of individual human experience should be extended to Dr. Osler for his annoyance under this most recent instance of newspaper misunderstanding of professional ideals.-American Medicine.

"Oslerize "-An Unfortunate Addition to the Dictionaries.Lost is the journal, lay or medical, yellow, pink, or white, that does not nowadays have a column devoted to Dr. Osler's re⚫ported opinions concerning the value, or preferably the valuelessness, of older men. To oslerize, to be oslerized, or worthy to be oslerized, are new terms which the lexicographer must henceforth define. And with a groan! Because he will have to caution against confounding the term with Bowdlerize, which

also means to delete; the objects excised are somewhat different, although the methods and motives may be similar. It is true that a sense of humor is necessary to save us from a too burdensome insistence of the tragic realities of life, but then it must spring from a just estimate and accurate perception of "things as they are," and especially must it not, per se, become a serious pursuit. How the professional representative, and consequently the profession itself, stands in the eye of the newspaper is not wholly a matter of indifference to any of us. And that is as true, perhaps more true, even if the newspaper reader has false and distorted ideas of the opinions of medical men. The newspapers already credit two suicides to their absurd reports of the value of men sixty years old. Some six months ago an essay on the work of great men in the profession was published, from which a couple of sentences may be quoted:

Only rising, young, and unknown men bring the work and its value to recognition. It is indeed usually the young ones that make the discoveries. In science, Davy, Young, Fresnel, Arago, Forbes, Joule, Mayer, Helmholtz, Sir Wm. Thomson, Clausius, Rankine, and others, were in their twenties when they made their greatest discoveries.-American Medicine.

The Function of Men Over Fifty Years of Age.It is true that the energizing discoveries and forces of the world are usually made and launched by the younger men. But there is another function and duty quite as valuable to humanity as discovery-more valuable, one must say-because discovery is bound to come soon or late, and by one mind, if not by another. The history of discoveries shows that they are practically made generations and perhaps centuries before the world accepts them. Their acceptance and utilization are, in a word, delayed by prejudice. By whose prejudices? Solely and simply by those of the elder men. They have passed the energizing and discovering time of life, and alas, they have not learned wisdom. Their true function is that of judgment, guidance, and advice; and almost without exception the older men, the so-called leaders of the profession, do not pronounce right judgment, do not guide expertly, do not advise correctly as to what and where is medical truth. It was twenty-two years after a clear-headed old farmer, who had been driven to practise vaccination by many years of observation of facts, had demonstrated the value of the measure -it was twenty-two years before Jenner dared inoculate the

Phipps boy. In announcing his discovery of thoracic percussion,
Auenbrugger wrote:

I realize that envy and blame, and even hatred and calumny, have never failed to come to men who have illuminated art or science by their discoveries, or have added to their perfection.

tion.

The opposition of Liebig and other leaders to the theory of micro-organisms kept the world in ignorance of it for a generaThe work of Morton in the discovery of anesthesia, of O. W. Holmes in that of puerperal fever, of McDowell, and of Sims in gynecology, as well as of almost all discoverers, was killed as long as possible, and in exactly this way, and precisely by the elder men, the leaders, the judges, the official spokesmen of the profession. If inclined to be ironically humorous, one might suggest that a lecture to our brother elders might well be devoted to a criticism of their evident dereliction in this duty. Dr. Osler blames old men for being no longer young, a foolish criticism at best, and too indiscriminately made, because much of the energizing work and many of the great discoveries have been made by men over forty; but he fails utterly to say a word against their wretchedest fault-the rejection of new truth that the young have discovered.-American Medicine.

"The Surgeon and the Public" is the title of a paragraph in an article in a recent number of McClure's Magazine, designed to plebify modern surgical ideas and methods. The matter is thus introduced:

"With increased knowledge, the attitude of the surgeon toward the public is changing. Men like Murphy of Chicago, Keen of Philadelphia, Kelly of Baltimore, and Richardson of Boston, are in revolt, more or less open, against the old tenet that the truths of medical science must not be profaned by exposure to the ignorant lay mind. Within certain limits, they are making good use of the public press on a principle which I recently heard expressed thus:

"It is an axiom of surgical practice that the earlier the case is taken, the better the chance of success. It follows that, if we can educate the public in the matter of the common surgical ailments, our patients will come to us more promptly, and we can get better results. Beside, with the mystery dissipated, the terror of operations will be greatly diminished. Take a very common case-appendicitis. I venture to say that the majority of persons believes the operation for appendicitis a very danger

1

ous one. In point of fact, the mortality is less than in diseases which are not feared at all; measles, for instance, or whoopingcough. Could we implant that fact in the public mind and get all our appendicitis cases early, instead of at the last development, as many of them now come to us, we could reduce the present low mortality by half. The policy of silence is a relic. It was made for the days when a physician who talked exposed his ignorance. Surgery is no longer empiric; we know what we are doing and we can afford to tell it.'

The article, however, closes with this quotation from Senn: "We have waded through the slough of fads. We have left behind us such errors as opening the skull for idiocy, and in hundreds of insane asylums the needless victims of our rage for ovariotomy mark the path by which we have come back to rational methods in gynecology. There are still many who, led into surgery by the hope of rich rewards, have had no time to learn its scientific principles. Brilliant operators, they diagnose with the knife. Remember this: That, with rare exceptions, the knife should never be taken up until the trouble is determined. The time for conservatism has come. We are here to assist nature, not to dictate. The great art of modern surgery is to limit operations to the cases where they can be of benefit.

We have made these excerpts for the purpose of bringing into closer juxtaposition and contrast illustrations of the newspaper man's idea of logic. "The knife should never be taken up until the trouble is determined," is set side by side with the appeal, real or supposed, to the lay public to decide itself when Ito come to the operating surgeon! The diagnostician, the internist, and the family physician are therefore to be dispensed with? According to the magazine writer the "trouble is to be determined" solely by the patient and his lay friends, educated by those surgeons who make "more or less open," but "good use of the public press." It is evidently a fitting opportunity for the surgeons to disclaim the injudicious zeal of the reporters.American Medicine.