This work could profitably be continued the third year, dwelling more upon the finer shades of physiological action than the coarser toxicological effects and not until the last year should any attempt be made to teach the student symptomatology. Even then it should be done more in the nature of review and as Kraft has so eloquently done for his classes, giving a mental picture of the remedy in the form of the patient, the pulsatilla patient and the nux patient, for example, is peculiarly Kraft's own and has never been successfully imitated.

Often the dose question is studiously ignored or treated as a nolo me tangere lest some zealot might become offended. This is wholly wrong, just as much wrong to the class as the attempt to make the student believe that the good prescriber only uses the highest potencies. All the facts of dilution should be taught, the fluxion as well as the Hahnemannian, and the student be given the opportunity to do a little thinking for himself. The student should not be impressed with the idea that nux in the 200x will produce an aggravation, unless it be demonstrated before the class in an experiment. Such experiments, if it be a fact, are so easily made that it ought to be considered offensive to an intelligent class merely to make the bare statement without some attempt at demonstration. In that case, the students themselves, and not the teacher alone, will be able to decide upon the evidence.

Less effort should be made to impress the student with the minimum dose than to inculcate the toxicologic dose. It is very often desirable to obtain a physiological effect. Doing this, without a full knowledge of toxicological effects of the remedies employed, is foolhardy and the physician finds himself woefully lacking in his mental. and professional equipment. While it is of the utmost importance to avoid baneful drug action under all circumstances, and the student should be duly impressed with this fact, yet the other extreme of avoiding all physiological action under all circumstances, is almost as grave a blunder. With this object in view all remedies should have a definite and uniform drug power.

Anathemas hurled at other schools by the professor of materia medica are becoming more and more out of date. The medical bigots are beginning to die off and the schools are not only getting more numerous, but also more tolerant of each other. The last grand attempt to annihilate schools through the creation of State boards of health has so signally failed that it is not likely that any further serious attempt will be made at extirpation. Hereafter the attempts will all point in the direction of amalgamation. It will not therefore be much longer the fashion to ridicule other schools; besides, the people are awakening to some of the frauds of medical practice. Sanitary

science, hygiene and bacteriology have reached a degree of development that the truths of these sciences are gaining the public ear. There are too many, nowadays, who regard the doctor who scoffs at other schools as a back number in his own school and are disposed to give him a back seat in the profession when medical services are required. Let us have bigger men in the chair of materia medica in some of our medical colleges, or have the subject of materia medica as one of the electives.

t

SENSATIONS PRODUCED BY THE WEATHER.

The phrase "aggravated by cold, damp weather," has a familiar ring to the homeopathic physician who has learned to class it as a symptom of value in guiding him to the selection of the similar remedy. But so far as we know little has been done to trace the relation between the weather and the feelings, to determine why a given individual should feel worse in cold, damp weather. A writer in the Medical News gives a suggestion that is worth consideration. He says: "Sometime it will come to be realized that many of the pains and aches that immediately precede and accompany damp weather, are not due to rheumatism, nor to the rheumatic diathesis, but are just plain everyday irritability consequent upon some change in nervous conditions which are caused by a drop in the barometer perhaps, or perhaps the hydroscopic variation in tissues which follows a change in the atmospheric humidity. Old people become walking barometers in their power to portend storms because the lessened elasticity of their arterial and vascular system prevents, or at least hampers, those changes in the peripheral circulation which would compensate for variations in barometric pressure. Whenever an injury has taken place around a joint this same state of affairs proclaims itself even in comparatively young subjects."

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I

SUPPURATIVE TONSILLITIS.

Cause. The disease usually arises from exposure to cold, from checked perspiration, either from cold air or cold bathing, or occasionally as a complication of follicular tonsillitis, though this is rare.

Course.-Beginning with soreness and swelling of one or both tonsils, it proceeds to suppuration within the tonsilar body, with increased swelling; finally the pus points at some superficial part of tonsil, is discharged, and the patient recovers.

Death rarely occurs, except in complicated cases.

Remedies. These may completely abort the attack if taken in

time; or, remedies may hasten the expulsion of pus and materially shorten convalescence.

Remedies that abort suppurative tonsillitis or quinsy:

Gelsemium. The patient usually has more or less of an initial chill following exposure. Often is cold from one to several hours. Seldom shaking, severe chill. Wants to cover up, get near the fire.

With chill begins severe frontal and general headache. Aching of the whole body and limbs, of the back, and especially of the loins. More or less fever follows, pains increased; little or no thirst. Pulse large, soft and rather slow.

Great prostration and disinclination to effort; a trifle seems a mountain; a rod a mile.

About this time throat begins to grow sore. A painful spot appears deep in tonsil, which hurts out of all proportion on swallowing. The throat looks red and inflamed.

The pain streaks into the ear on swallowing.

Progress of disease rapid.

Recipe:- Gelsemium 2x, half drachm to 1⁄2 glass of water. Sig. A teaspoonful, every 20 minutes, or in very severe cases, 10 minutes. This remedy will abort completely if began during the chill, or the first hours of the fever. Patient should be convalescent in twenty-four hours.

Same remedy same way when the soreness is first observed in the tonsil, will abort it in two or three hours; all pain disappearing. But all cases are not amenable to Gelsemium, as I have found on several occasions.

Baryta carb., or Baryta muriaticum. For suppurative tonsillitis I have found these remedies of about equal value, and use either that comes to hand in 3x to 6x potency.

The chill is seldom present; fever is usually absent, or only slight. Pain in head moderate or absent; no pain in body or limbs. Pain streaking to one or both ears when swallowing; severe but not so excruciating as in Gelsemium.

Progress of disease slow.

Baryta muriaticum 3x, 30 drops to 14 glass water. Dose 1 teaspoonful, every half hour until better, then every hour. The establishment of convalescence is usually not longer delayed than twelve hours after the remedy is begun, as directed.

There are several other remedies also recommended.

Silicea is good in case of severe prickings, as of a pin at one definite point, in the tonsil.

This differs from the big, sore, exceedingly painful tonsil of Gel

semium, and from the moderately but persistently sore tonsil of Baryta.

In all three pain shoots to the ear on swallowing. These three remedies will cover most cases.

Other remedies are Lycopodium, Hepar sulph., Lachesis and Lac caninum. I never have had occasion to use them to abort an attack of quinsy, but do not doubt that they are useful and efficacious when indicated, especially Lycopodium.

Silicea, by the way, is sovereign in whitlow or felon of the tips of fingers or thumbs. The patient thinks he has a thistle or splinter in the member, and searches earnestly but unsuccessfully for it, with needle or knife. After a day or so more severe pain sets in. If at this point Silicea 3x, 6x or 30x is given, very often the whole trouble disappears within twenty-four hours.- Van Denberg, in The Chironian.

Among the Journals.

The question "Was Mohammed an epileptic?" is discussed by Dr. M. L. Moharrem Bey (Jour. of Nervous and Mental Disease), and after reviewing the case in its various aspects, he concludes, from a purely medical standpoint that there is no basis for the assumption that the prophet was thus afflicted. He calls attention to the character of the so-called attacks when he would lie down on the floor and would' be covered with a garment and have a pillow placed under his head by those near him, and distinguishes them from the genuine epileptic attacks. These attacks were not followed by stupor, but the prophet would arouse himself quickly and begin at once to relate his divine revelation. Furthermore, the character of his intelligence, which was maintained until his death at sixty-three of an acute febrile disease, rules out the possibility of his having suffered in any degree from epileptic dementia.

THE CONTROL OF MOUTH BREATHING AT NIGHT.

S. W. Tufts (Am. Med., Jan. 31, 1903) gives the following as a simple method for preventing mouth breathing. Stick a piece of isinglass court plaster, about 3 in. by 14 in. across the closed lips. It can be removed easily and without irritating the lips. Of patients with acute and chronic diseases of the respiratory tract 90 per cent. are mouth breathers at night. If the nose is not used, the mucous membrane congests, and gradually thickens from hypernutrition. Air

passing through the nose receives 20° to 40° of heat, and becomes at least two-thirds saturated with moisture, and thus the nose becomes a most effective germ filter. The mouth has none of these functions, and when it is used for breathing, the lungs must receive many germs and suffer injury from the unmodified air. When the immense mortality from lung diseases is considered, the importance of this subject can better be realized. Tufts has obtained better results in the treatment of respiratory diseases since the use of this method.

PREVENTION OF TUBERCULOSIS IN CHILDREN.

Let the sunshine into the darkened streets and alleys, narrow courts and reeking tenements, and there will be less tuberculosis among the children. Every new park, every new playground, every improved tenement will help in the fight against this greatest scourge of mankind. This is no new doctrine, but it is doctrine that needs to be proclaimed until it is lived up to.-Archives of Pediatrics.

THE HOUR OF DEATH.

A note in the Gaz. Med. de Paris states that a physician observed the hour of death of 2,880 persons of all ages in a mixed population and during a period of several years. He found that the maximum hour of death is from 5 to 6 A. M.; minimum 9 to 11 A. M. From 10 A. M. to 3 P. M. the mortality is not high, and the most fatal hours are from 3 to 6 A. M. The conclusion is that death generally comes when the sick are least nourished and cared for. If care were taken death could be postponed in many cases.

MENTAL Diseases, EARLY DIAONOSIS OF.

The writer defined insanity as "a prolonged departure from the individual's normal standard of thinking, feeling, and acting," saying that this would, for working purposes, be found sufficient. A comprehensive definition would include mental defect of whatever cause and mental perturbation of whatever degree.

Any or all of the elemental processes of sensation, perception, ideation, reasoning, judgment, memory, may be impaired in insanity. In the paper the nature and degree of impairment of these elemental processes and of emotion and volition, in different forms of insanity, were touched upon. Subjects discussed at greater length were the distinction between confirmed inebriety and true insanity of alcoholic origin, the differential diagnosis of alcoholic pseudoparesis and paretic dementia, certain phases of hysteria, and the diagnostic difficulties pertaining to paranoia and recurrent mania. Neurasthenia