1879. In 1880 he was appointed city physician, in 1882 elected coroner and re-elected in 1884. In 1886 he took a trip abroad. In 1889 he served as county physician, then for six years he was a member and president of the board of managers of the Hospital for the Insane No. 2. In 1898 he was elected mayor of his native city. He leaves a wife and three child

ren.

This is the brief chronicle of a man's life. As a young man he commenced the study of medicine-the ambition of his life. Thirty years ago men were grasping the mere facts revealed by the microscope and the test tube, and medicine was characterized by a more limited conception. The gaps were filled by guesses and conjectures, too often widely divergent from the truth These gaps and breaks in our knowledge serve as an ever present stimulus for the truth and enlightenment. Some order has been brought about since by a process of elimination, a constant revaluation and proper classification. I remember a conversation with Dr. Kirschner about a year ago, speaking on the idea of the individuality of disease. Recently

an eminent authority voiced almost a similar statement before the British Medical Association. His remarks were directed against the idea of abstract disease as a so-called morbid entity.

"To treat the same disease in the same way in all persons is to do much like the tailor who supplied all his customers with clothes made to the same measure, without taking their particular measures. If doctor's give physic but seldom take it-as the old gibe is may not that be because, knowing something of their own constitutions and of the causes and beginnings of disease, they adopt timely measures of precaution and a system of treatment sorting with their habits and temper of body and mind."

Dr. Kirschner was no therapeutic nihilist, although a keen observer at the bedside. He took advantage of the Hippocratic doctrine of vis medicatrix naturae, lauded its happy tendencies, but he did not reject actual interferences when nature showed her bad tendencies. He did not wait for the tissues and juices of a child to manufacture an antidote for the poisons of diphtheria, but secured an artificial preparation and injected it. Expectancy and nihilism in physics would never have produced a modern locomotive, an automobile, an electric light, a wireless message or an ocean greyhound.

Dr. Kirschner was a well educated and capable physician who performed a great many surgical operations without taking advantage of the calcium light. He was always a member of our local societies and always threw his influence in the direction and encouragement of the regular medical profession. He believed with Virchow that "the physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.

He was of a cold and diffident exterior, difficult to get acquainted with, but on closer acquaintance ripened into a pleasant companion and many physicians of this city can testify to his generous heart. As mayor of this city or as an officer in any public position he left a spotless record. Officially and individually he believed that sanity and morality consist in balance. His public record is a compliment to the medical profession. As chief executive of this city he stood for the same principle that we

attribute to President Roosevelt-honesty. He was a man of strong individuality, subservient to the whims of no man or set of men, no obsequious bowing to well-clad insolence, and never learned the accomplishment of the modern, genuine, artistic sycophant. He displayed to an unusual degree the natural development of the free and independent Ameriican spirit.

Dr. Kirschner was born beyond the want of the material interests of life, but by his own energies he succeeded in life much beyond the average. From the start of his professional life he began with a fair amount of business and soon enjoyed a lucrative practice until his health began to fail. What a man had done for others, not what he might say about himself, formed his best life. He believed with Pestalozzi, who after a long life spent in works of benevolence, came at last to the conclusion that no man could be much hepled or hindered by any one but himself.

Dr. Kirschner visited Europe in order to see their great medical giants and he thought as little of physicians who did not wish to know the fathers of medicine as he would have thought of an American citizen, politically, who did not know of Washington or Jefferson.

We cannot all be great men. It is surprising sometimes to find how little difference there is between ordinary and extraordinary men. The great man has greater capacity for work. Medical science owes much to individuals. But even that greatest of medical giants, Virchow, required others to prepare the ground which he cultivated so industriously. of us are content to pass throngh life, quiet and unassuming:

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
His sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool sequestered vale of life,
He kept the noiseless tenor of his way.

Most

Every good act, every high resolve, entitles us to be counted one in the census of the universe. What an amount of the lives of other men is reflected in us; their joys, their affections, their happiness, their misery! Think of the great part of others that we absorb through literature, poetry, art and music. Other people's happiness is a very considerable and essential portion of our own Man has never had and never will have any other object than the conquest of happiness. Happiness depends less upon the cicrcumstances in which we live than upon our inner state of mind, that is to say, upon our morality.

Is the real every day brotherhood of man only a dream, or, are we really and truly interested in each other's welfare?

The effect of the deeds of a good man are not unlike the beautiful illustration of the transmitted motion in water. Everyone who has thrown a pebble into the still waters of a sheltered pool has seen the circles it raised, gradually expanding in size, and as uniformly diminishing in distinctness. He may have observed the reflection of those waves from the edges of the pool. He may have noticed also the perfect distinctness with which two, three or more series of waves each pursues its own unimpeded course, when diverging from two, three or more centers of disturbance. He may have seen, in such cases the particles of water where the waves intersect each other, partake of the movements due to each series. The ripple on the ocean's surface, the track of a ponderous vessel gliding over

its bosom, these momentary waves, apparently born but to die, leave behind them an endless progeny, reviving with diminished energy in other seas, resisting a thousand shores, reflected from each, and perhaps again partially concentrated, will pursue their ceaseless course till ocean be itself annihilated.

Life is short, but if it be vigorous, would it be better if it last longer? Our departed friend experienced all the good thinga any man could get out of life, and if a man could live a thousand years or only fifty, it would only be a question of memories, unless our capacity for enjoy. ment would increase, and this it evidently does not There has been too much teaching of a gloomy pessimism. Dr. P. J. Kirschner has left behind him the memory and influence of a straight-forward, honest, industrious life and he has been both a lover of mankind and of his chosen profession.

WHAT ARE THE FUNCTIONS OF THE THYROID GLAND ?*

John D. Seba, M. D., Bland; Mo.

WILL not attempt to answer the title of my paper, but will simply advance a few thoughts that might be of interest to the medical profession. On the 21st day of May, 1902, Dr. S. M. Reynolds, of King City, Mo., read a paper before the State Medical Society at St. Joseph, Mo., on "Acromegaly with a presentation of a case." In discussing his case I said in part: "Of late years great inquiry has been made as to the function of the thyroid gland, it has been found that certain disorders of this gland have the power of stunning the growth of the individual possessing the same. I refer to myxedema, producing cretinism. The question may be asked what is a cretin? and the answer invariably must be, "A cretin is an individual whose growth and development has been arrested, both mentally and physically. A boy seven years old that develops cretinism will to all purposes be seven mentally and physically when he is twenty-one years old, unless he has been treated and given the extract of thyroid gland. Now then if a disorder of the thyroid gland has the power to produce cretinism in one person, may not an opposite disorder of said gland produce the opposite results in another person. May not the thyroid be responsible for a dwarf here and a giant there?"

Since that time several physiologists have been investigating the thyroid. They have been devoting their leisure hours towards prospecting around and about the thyroid. Sometimes they find indications that they think leads to great discoveries, only to find that the pathological veins runs into another mystery. But that should not discourage us. In Biblical ages it was thought the heart was the seat of intelligence. But gradually it has been established that the brain is the seat of all intellectual phenomena. Let us not for once imagine that all is known that

*Read before the Gasconade County Medical Society, October 26th, 1905, at Bland, Mo.

is worth knowing about the thyroid. Just pick up some of our works on physiclogy and read up on the subject, and you will find how vague their explanations are. The functions, of the thyroid may be studied from different standpoints.

The surgeon who removes them entirely finds that he must keep on administering extract of the gland for an indefinite period, to avoid untoward symptoms. The physician who is given charge of a cretin and who sticks faithfully to the administration of the extract can congratulate himself that he is doing some good. Myxedema, enlargement of, or goiter, are benefited with thyroid extract, and reports have come to us where cases of acromegaly have been benefited by its faithful administration. Taking all this evidence together and weighing it carefully, and then calling upon our imagination somewhat, we can easily come to some conclusions.

These conclusions are, that in some mysterious way the thyroid body presides over the nutrition, when it gets balky and refuses to do its full duty the individual who is the unhappy possessor of the same, ceases to develop and becomes technically a cretin, or commonly speaking a runt. Whereas, on the other hand, if he possesses an over active thyroid he may keep on growing until he becomes a giant, or an acromeglac; or in other words, until he wears No. 13 shoes, a No. 8 hat and is six feet and four or five inches tall; that is to say, if our conclusions and deductions are right. Dr. Green of Detroit, who is deeply interested in the subject, and who has made investigations himself is almost coming to the same conclusions, but one swallow does not make a summer. When you see two of us flying in the same direction, its an indication that summer may be coming sometime or other.

If some of us us are on the right trail-and I hope we are-and it should ever be established that the thyroid presides over nutrition, growth and development, then no doubt some other man will go to work and give us thyroidal localization; will tell us, just what wing or what portions presides over the development of the Chicago girl's feet. Then, too, and then only will we understand why Missouri politicians suffer from a diarrhea of words and constipation of the mind, that the tongue has been over developed, and is buzzing away without intelligent directions. They will of course be styled tongue giants and mental cretins. It would explain many oddities in life, and would even help the neurologist in properly classifying the ever present sexual pervert.

If there is a blessing on the man who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before there should be a double blessing on him who can cause one doctor to practice where two did before.

THE JOHN T. HODGEN MEDICAL SOCIETY, embraicng the counties of Cass, Bates, Vernon and Barton, held its annual meeting in Nevada October 5. The following officers were elected: Dr. McCord G. Roberts, Lamar, president; Drs. Theodrick C. Boulware, Butler, and M. P. Overholzer, Harrisonville, vice-president, and Dr. Thomas F. Lockwood, Butler, secretary and traesurer. The next meeting will be held in Lamar.