MEDICAL SUCCESS IN THE FACE OF DIFFICULTIES. Sir Andrew Clark, from the summit of English professional success, has been reviewing the way which led him, and his reflections, as contained in an address made. by him on the occasion of the presentation to him of his portrait by the medical and surgical staff of the London Hospital a few weeks since, can not fail of interest for all medical readers.

He was born in Scotland, and received his early education at Aberdeen. He went to London at the end of the year 1853 to study pathology, but with no intention whatever of engaging in the practice of medicine. He says he had never seen his parents, for they died in his infancy; he had never lived under the roof a relative; he had only one acquaintance; he had no introductions, and he was in such poor health that, according to a physician whom he consulted at the time, his expectation of life was only one year. On the other hand, he tells us that he had some advantages by way of counterbalance. These were a small patrimony, large love of work, and perfect self-dependence, which prevented him from ever asking favors of any man. "I had the habit of dealing with every day of my life as if it were my whole life," he says. "I was contented and happy over what the day brought me. I had no ambition of any kind, and I hated schemes and intrigues."

His first employment at the London Hospital was in the museum of that institution. After he had been there a while a vacancy occurred on the staff, and he became a candidate for the appointment, being warmly supported by his colleagues and the medical students. There were other candidates for the place, and the contest was a severe one. "It was the greatest fight," says Sir Andrew Clark, "that had ever been fought at a London hospital, and I well remember, when the fight was over, how one of the

opposing parties said: 'Poor Scotch beggar! let him have it; he can not by any possibility have six months to live.' But the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; I am still living and working among you to-day, the sole representative of the staff of thirty-five years ago."

After frankly saying that he never expected to achieve the material success he has met with, Sir Andrew Clark said he presumed some of the students present would like to know from him what conditions he thought were essential to make a man a successful physician. These he gave as follows: "Firstly, I believe that every man's suc cess is within himself, and must come out of himself. No true, abiding, and just success can come to any man in any other way. Secondly, a man must be seriously in earnest. He must act with singleness of heart and in earnest; he must do with all his might and with all his concentration of thought the one thing at the one time which he is called upon to do. And if some of my young friends should say here, 'I can not do that, I can not love work,' then I answer that there is a certain remedy, and it is work. Work in spite of yourself, and make the habit of work, and when the habit of work is formed it will be transfigured into the love of work; and at last you will not only abhor idleness but you will have no happiness out of the work, which then you are constrained from love to do. Thirdly, the man must be charitable, not censorious, self-effacing, not self-seeking; and he must try at once to think and to do the best for his rivals and antagonists that can be done. Fourthly, the man must believe that labor is life, that successful labor is life and gladness, and that successful labor, with high aims and just objects, will bring to him the fullest, truest, and happiest life that can be lived upon the earth."-Boston Medical and Surgical Journal.

SIR HENRY ROSCOE, M. P., delivered an address at Birmingham this week, as president of the Midland Institute, taking for his subject the "The Life-work of M. Pasteur,"

whose discoveries, he said, had culminated in the cure of that most dreaded and fearful of all maladies, hydrophobia. This was not the result of a happy chance, but the last link in a long chain of discoveries, including the exterminating of cholera, of cattle disease, and of splenic fever. Thus to M. Pasteur we owed the science of bacteriology, which dealt with the minute organisms called microbes, and which bids fair to revolutionize the theory and practice of medicine.-London Lancet, October 12, 1889.

GUNPOWDER AS A MEANS OF CRIMINAL ABORTION.-Dr. Alexander I. Voitzekhovsky describes (Proceedings of the Elisavetgrad Medical Society, September 20, 1888) two curious cases of criminal abortion caused by the internal use of gunpowder, in the dose of a small-sized wineglassful. In both of the women, who were peasants, the fetus was expelled in a few hours after the inges tion of a single dose. The substance seems to enjoy the reputation of a reliable emmenagogue and ecbolic in Russian popular medicine. As Dr. Voitzekhovsky thinks, it acts identically as savine oil, rue, powerful drastics, and such like ecbolic drugs, which give rise to abortion through their causing primary toxic gastro-enteritis. The most energetic ingredients of gunpowder are said to be nitrate of potassium and sulphur. The author also mentions a case of abortion, at the second month of pregnancy, in a woman who used for the purpose large quantities of the so-called glühwein (Russian glintvein); that is, a red wine mulled with such spices as cloves, cinnamon, pepper, etc.Medical and Surgical Reporter.

THE annual meeting of the Southern Surgical and Gynecological Association will be held in the Senate Chamber, Nashville, Tenn., November 12, 13, and 14, 1889. President, Hunter McGuire, M. D., Richmond, Va.; Vice-Presidents, W. O. Roberts, M. D., Louisville, Ky., Bedford Brown, M. D., Alexandria, Va.; Secretary, W. E. B. Davis, M. D., Birmingham, Ala.; Treasurer, Hardin P. Cochrane, M. D., Birmingham,

Ala.; Judicial Council, John S. Cain, M. D., Nashville, Tenn., W. T. Briggs, M. D., Nashville, Tenn., J. M. Taylor, M. D., Corinth, Miss., DeSaussure Ford, M. D., Augusta, Ga., Virgil O. Hardon, M. D., Atlanta, Ga.; Committee of Arrangements, J. R. Buist, M. D., Duncan Eve, M. D., Richard Douglas, M. D., J. H. Blanks, M. D., W. T. Briggs, M. D. The programme, which is very large, appeared in our issue of September 12th.

AN epidemic of typhoid fever recently broke out in the New York Central car shops at West Albany, N. Y., and by September 24th there had been eight deaths, and about three hundred men were prostrated by the disease or kept at home by the sickness of some member of their families. The outbreak was caused, according to one account, by drinking water from wells poisoned by the drainage from outhouses; according to another the danger lies in the fact that a portion of the infected district drains into an old reservoir which is still used by the lower portion of the city, and the foul condition of which was the cause of the efforts two years ago to obtain a new supply of water for the city. In one large shop, employing several hundred men who have used the city service water, not a case of sickness has occurred.— Medical and Surgical Reporter.

THE ratio of illegitimate births in the various countries of Europe is, according to the last reports, as follows: Out of every hundred births, seven were illegitimate. among the Spanish, eleven among the Italians, sixteen among the English, and twenty-four among the Germans. In Paris, however, the illegitimate births reached thirty-eight among people of French nativity.

CHAS. CHADWICK, Ottis R. Wyeth, Louis Schoen, Geo. J. Schoen, Chas. F. Herrmann, Geo. Eyssell, and Horace L. Roy, druggists, of this city, were brought before Judge Worthen, to-day, and each fined $500 and costs for counterfeiting a trade-mark preparation, known as Bromidia.

KANSAS CITY, Mo., October 28, 1889.

THE CELEBRATED PAINTING of Rembrandt, called the "Anatomical Lesson," has been bought, it is said, by Mr. Ellesworth for

THE Berlin Academy of Sciences has granted the sum of one thousand five hundred marks to Professor L. Brieger for the furtherance of his researches on ptomaines, and a like sum to Dr. Fleischmann, of Erlangen, in aid of his investigations on devel

ment.

DR. CARL KOLLER, who has achieved such world-wide renown in the discovery of the application of cocaine as a local anesthetic, has been appointed Instructor in Ophthalmology at the New York Polyclinic.

PROFESSOR VIRCHOW telegraphs from Berlin that the Organizing Committee of the Tenth International Medical Congress has been constituted by the election of himself President and Dr. Lasar Secretary General.

ENGLISH medical experts are now making strong arguments in favor of the corset. Thus, little by little, evidence accumulates to show that the corset has come to stay.Maryland Medical Journal.

A good question for the antiquarian is whether the corset has come to stay, or the stay has come to corset.-ED.

IN Austria there are only 218 homeopathists out of the whole number of medical men, which is 7,183; and only 44 of these profess to practice homeopathy exclusively, and the number also is said to be steadily decreasing.

DR. LUTZE, formerly assistant in Dr. Unna's clinic at Hamburg, has been invited to proceed to Honolulu by the Hawaiian Government, and to remain there some time, to

belonged to the Princess de Sagan.

A COMPANY is putting down a shaft into Grand Avenue Cave, four miles from Mammoth Cave, for the purpose of bringing up the air and putting it into the rooms of a large hotel which they propose to build, both as a pleasure-resort and sanitarium.

methods of treatment.

Little Johnnie Day lies here,
He neither cries nor frets;

He had just reached his thirteenth year-
Cigarettes.
[Troy Press.

LAST year 1,356 persons died of delirium tremens in England.

VOL. VIII.

[NEW SERIES.]

Certainly it is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them. Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a plain way; and we want downright facts at present more than any thing else.-RUSKIN.

Original Articles.

REMARKS ON THE ALBUMINATE OF IRON.*

BY JOHN A. OUCHTERLONY, M. D. Professor of Principles and Practice of Medicine and Clinical Medicine, University of Louisville.

Although very many preparations of iron are officinal and many others are in frequent use which have not found a place in the pharmacopeia, yet it seems the number of these compounds is still increasing.

The fact is that iron is so important a remedy, is useful in so many diseases and so often demanded in a multitude of clinical states, that the ingenuity and skill of the chemist is ever stimulated to new efforts in the desire of producing a preparation that shall contain this substance in a form unirritating to the tissues with which it comes in contact, easily absorbed and readily assimilated; in other words, the most rapid

and certain hematic.

It is believed that albuminate of iron, conforming to certain chemical and physiological requirements, will be found, in many instances, to be the most eligible iron compound at the disposal of the physician. Clinical experience extending now over a series of years has justified the high expectations formed of its desirability and power, while the facility with which it lends itself to varied combinations vastly enhances its value and scope.

In endeavoring to form an estimate of the *Read before the Louisville Clinical Society.October 22, 1889.

No. 11.

value of any preparation of iron it is to be remembered that the compound of iron in the blood is organic and of an oxydized character. According to Ringer's observations organic salts of iron are less astringent and stimulating than the inorganic salts of the same metal, and organic ferric salts possess greater chalybeate properties than do the ferrous combinations. The same author also remarks that protosalts are converted into persalts in the stomach and duodenum, very likely by the oxygen. swallowed. Hence it appears that any form of iron given by the mouth, which is not already in the oxydized state, undergoes this change before it is absorbed from the stomach or intestine. Indeed it seems essential that it be in the ferric state in order that it may be appropriated.

According to Binz soluble preparations of iron combine with the albumen of chyme and form albuminates soluble in acid, and according to Ringer the soluble preparations of iron combine with albumen in the stomach. Insoluble preparations of iron, however, are but partially dissolved in this viscus, and that in very variable degrees. Ringer has also remarked that, according to most authorities, the iron in the blood combines with the albumen, and that very probably, like most other metals, it exists in the body only as an albuminate. The experiments of Quevenne long since demonstrated that the soluble preparations of iron are precipitated by the gastric juice, even when the latter is strongly acid, and Wood thinks the precipitate is albuminate, mixed with oxide of the metal when the juice is alkaline.

Bartholow also believes that it is probably as albuminate that iron is absorbed