never be mistaken for any other thirst. What becomes of the salt so ingested? Boericke and Dewey in their Tissue Remedies, say:

"It is the function of salt to regulate the degree of moisture within the cells. (That's my first key-line, in contradistinction to what some of our authors call the key-note, or the red-line of a remedy.) Remember that: The action of salt is to regulate the degree of moisture in the cells. How is that accomplished? By virtue of its property of attracting water taken with the food and drink, which it carries to the blood, whence it eventually reaches the various cells, giving them their proper bath of water. Every cell of the entire body contains soda, combining with nascent chlorine, which is formed by splitting up the chloride of sodium (salt) contained in the intercellular fluids; and this chloride of sodium (salt) within the cell,-each cell of the human body,-possesses the property of attracting water, as a towel hung by one end in a basin of water attracts the water and holds it. On the other hand, if no chloride of sodium is formed within the cell, then the water that was bill-of-lading'd to supply moisture to these cells, is sidetracked in the intercellular fluids, which latter get larger and larger until they burst, are divided, the water seeps into the tissues of the body and we have hydraemia. Now what happens? The patient shows a watery, bloated appearance, is languid, drowsy, lachrymose, chilly, especially along the spine and extremities. He craves salt, salt, salt; and although he may take it from the salt-box in handfuls, the diseased condition is not removed, simply because the cells cannot take up the salt particles, unless offered in a very dilute condition-in other words, in the homeopathic dosage."

There is much more to this chemical exposition which I shall not insert here, but ask you to get this excellent book, The Tissue Remedies, and work it out for yourself. Suppose we apply this chemical item, plus the first, everyday use or misuse of salt, and where will we have the first noticeable breakdown? In the tissues to be sure. In what way? In the weakening of muscles, starvation of tissues, digestion slow and imperfect, nutrition not completed, and assimilation defective. You have attacked the prima viae itself and the man starves to death in the midst of the full-dinner-pail prosperity which hedges him round about and hems him in on all sides and angles even in Presidential years. He becomes thin and emaciated, haggard, a bad looker-bad eyes, sore and nasty, minus brows and winkers, because the discharges of the body wherever found are filled with the undistributed salt, and, therefore, cause burning and smarting; his hair falls out, not as in alopecia, but as a general proposition, not confined to his scalp, but attacking every hair-bulb wherever found on his body. He has a sore nose, from the burning, acrid fluid gingerly worming its way like a worm through the dried and parching mucous membrane, over the lip, searing a red line wherever it touches, as it does with the internal canthi of the eyes; as it does in the discharges from the nose; from the mouth; from the gonorrheal centers; from leucorrhea; from uterine discharges; and from diarrhoæs. And, in addition, upon this seared and reddened surface, made by this briny, burny discharge, we find pearly blisters, filled with the burny,

briny fluid, which, when they break, add still yet more to the gaiety of nations by making the poor victim still "hotter" and more blasphemous. Do you not now understand that line in our books, that the orifices of natrum mur. are surrounded with pearly blisters? It is because of the acrid, burny, briny, blistery discharges which pass through them.

Salt, you know, is used to cure things, notably hog products, hams, side and the like. It does this by a species of dessication, shrinking the meat and drying up its juiciness, making it dry, tough and salty. A muscle that has been "nourished" in this fashion becomes dry, harsh, tough and lifeless. It loses its resiliency, its rubber, its elasticity. It is dead for all purposes. Now you try to exercise that muscle and it is tired, awfully tired, "oh, so tired, Doctor." The patient trembles as from unwonted or undue exertion. Persisted in, a weakening sweat exudes, which is salty, and leaves nasty sores upon the body, especially around the hat-band area, around the waist in women who wear tight corsets-very few, however, wear tight corsets or drink strong tea-or under the garter, or over the instep of a tight shoe. Wherever there is a pressure, however slight, combined with the moisture that is brackish and nasty, you will find sores.

The water in the cells, or in the intercellular fluids, being gobbled up in the mad effort of nature to dilute the excess of salt in the tissues of the body, becomes itself salty, excessively so, and in the dependent portions of the body where a puddle of water may form, it forms-hydraemia it is called; the patient becomes bloated, dropsical, and withall frightfully emaciated. So that the great one word for this remedy is EMACIATION! We find these little bags of water hanging under the eyes, under the chin, at the sides of the face, in the dew-laps, under the arm-pits, along the lower line of the abdomen, in the genitalia of both sexes, in the knees, ankles and feet. I need not tell you how to distinguish this peculiar form of dropsy from that of apis or arsenic or any of the other many remedies which have dropsical effusion. But you will understand, I think, why these bags and pouches of salty water form in natrum mur. patients, what they contain, and what, if they break or are broken, you will expect to have happen. With the dropsy as depicted and for the reasons assigned, there is a thirst, constant and unsatisfiable; wants a stream of water running down his throat constantly from the bottom of the well-the bacteriae-laden well; almost like Lo, the poor Indian who wished his throat might be a mile long so he could taste the fire-water all the way down, or like the sea-sick fellow, who took mint-juleps, because they tasted as good coming up as they did going down. This poor, emaciated, dropsical, chilly, natrum mur. patient wants tasty things, and by that he means things well salted. He quarrels with his wife that the bread and food are without salt; that the salt used on the table has lost its savor and snarlingly orders to try some other grocer. He wants oysters and sea-fruit which contain of themselves the salt element which he craves.

Because of the inability of his system to take up the salt, the blood gets no salt, and, hence, the blood is lacking in one of its very essential

!

elements. Instead, therefore, of being at par, let us say and ready to do business, its stock is badly watered; its value is less than par-a good deal less-for the salt element, as we all know, is a large one in the blood stream; so that, in place of nourishing and rounding out and beautifying the body, smoothing and silkening the hair, the blood goes about its work in a lazy, listless, loaferish, lack-a-daisical, lachrymose fashion. His skin is yellow, a yellowish-grey, or of a color like red hair turning grey, with sepia shadows about the deeply sunken eyes. She is thin and angular, and complains of her prominent clavicles; there may be an exaggerated smudge of red on each cheek, high up, like the war-paint of the stage Indian, and a greasy zone across the nose; but they are always cold and chilly-these natrum peoplethough they cannot bear the heat of the stove or of the direct rays of the sun. The man bundles up his neck in silk handkerchiefs, turns up the collar of his coat against the least wind, day or night, wears heavy-fleeced underwear and heavy outer wear to produce a heat which his enfeebled saltladen body cannot generate from within.

Take the mucous membranes anywhere or everywhere under these poisoned conditions and what would you expect to find? With only a few notable exceptions, known to all of us, they are dried, parched, cracked, bleeding, feverish and hot. In the mouth we have that shrunken, shrivelled dried-up tongue, cracked and bleeding, with just enough of moisture to form a paste to glue it to the roof of the sticky and feverish mouth. The gums are dry, colorless, little sores about the teeth, bleeding and painful. The throat is equally dry and harsh; the cough tears like a barbed hook; the ears have a foul discharge, if they are not loaded with dried-up wax, and, therefore dull of hearing. The vagina is so dry and parched and shrivelled and painful, so as to prohibit all thought of sexual congress; the walls of this organ being in contact, and without much moisture, except the little acrid, briny rill which forces its burning, searing way from the uterus to the outer world, makes entrance almost a physical impossibility, even for the nozzle of her fountain syringe. The uterus is backward in emptying itself of that which it no longer contains, namely: rich, warm blood; thus her body re-absorbs that detritus and a species of auto-intoxication ensues. Hence we have retarded, or lost, menstruation; or if there be a menstrual flow it is like to be painful, acrid, burny and blister-forming. In the male there is a predominating lifelessness of his generative system-on the principle that where there is no blood there is no life; he lacks desire, capability and power of performance. We all know the appearance of the parts in a natrum mur. gonorrhea, male or female. The stool is dry and harsh, rough, painful and scant. What else could it be if we but remember the condition of the alimentary canal from start to finish? The mucous membrane is dry. Because of the little food ingested, the stool is necessarily scant. What little moisture might inhere in the faeces is held up and appropriated at every frontier post by the tissue customs officials and so, little by little, the quantity becomes hard and dry and painful because it must plod its weary homeward way against

all manner, sorts and conditions of odds through the apposed walls, until it emerges through the last sphinctre, carrying with it the blood scraped up along its passage. And not content with all this infernal devastation-for infernal means lower regions-it tears its way through the sphinctres and produces fissures.

However, having now attained the chief end of man, which used to trouble me so much in my catechism-days, before I engaged in my present parish-practice, I deem it high time to close the spinctre of my salty eloquence.

Still, in complete consonance with the assumed position I occupy in my medical diocese, I must have a "Thirdly and Finally, my Brethren." I have not given you all to be found in searching the Scriptures for natrum mur. indications. There is abundant material in this one remedy for days of lecturings. I have only essayed to touch upon the dim, outlying outskirts of this valuable medical accessory, in the hope to stimulate some of you to investigate the remedy more thoroughly; and to prevent others from turning it down; for I have heard it said, from the homeopathic platform, too, "we don't use or teach natrum mur., because, like sulphur. it is an element found in every part of the created universe, and, therefore, cannot be of value in medicine."

Is it not far better, brethren, to understand a remedy-any remedy of our materia medica-in some such way as I have tried to picture it in this paper, than endeavor to memorize by beating of foreheads, and breast-bones, and wiggling of knees and applications of cold water compresses to the forehead, the almost innumerable-nay, truly they are inumerable-symptoms, which are usually read off to us from the lecture-platform, and which, even to this day and hour, find a leading, all-star, lime-lighted place in the makeup of materia medica papers in some of our homeopathic journals.

Is it not safer and eminently more satisfactory in the daily practice, to have and to hold a handful of reliable, fire-tested and profession-tried symptoms of, say, thirty practical remedies under your hat, ready at two o'clock of a rainy, muddy, God-forsaken morning, seven or four-and-a-half kilometers from your base of supplies, than to have several hundred remedies in carefully annotated notes, lying on that melodious melodeon in your horse-hair-furnitured parlor, together with those ghastly crayon caricatures of your dead and forgotten ancestors, all whereof gathering dust, bacteriae bacili, bugs, and other scientific impedimenta?

We resent the appellation of "Doc". Such a title involves a degree of familiarity which is inimical to the dignity and self respect that is ours by right and precedent. Our "dead beat" list contains the names of those who call us "Doc" and "old man". Studied politeness towards this class will beget in return some measure of the respect due our profession.

THE HOMEOPATHIC SPECIALIST.

BY JAS. A. CAMPBELL, M. D., ST. LOUIS.

In an assembly like this, of intelligent and experienced homeopathic physicians, a discussion concerning the pronounced advantages, which homeopathic medication has in medical specialism, as compared to similar practice of the older methods, would seem almost out of place. inasmuch as the proposition is to us so self-evident and everyday apparent.

On the other hand there are important aspects of the subject, which are often overlooked or ignored, which for every reason should demand our careful attention.

My own observations teach me, and I am sure that many homeopathic specialists in other lines will confirm it, that many of our patrons are not homeopathic in their beliefs or practice but have old-school physicians in their families, and come to us simply because they know of us, or of our work, among their friends. To them it is really a matter of indifference as to what our theories are, or our school of practice is-their prime and only object is to get well. I am quite sure that this is likewise the feeling which animates many of our patients in other directions. The interest of some is perhaps aroused by the difference in the taste of the medicines we may use, or the size of the dose given.

The question often asked is "what is the difference between the homeopathic specialist and the old-school specialist?" This question may be briefly answered by saying that the difference is precisely the same as it is between the old-school and the homeopathic general practitioner. The point of divergence lies not in the anatomy, physiology, pathology, methods of examination or diagnosis, laws of refraction or operative measures, for these are necessarily alike in both schools of medicine, but the sole difference lies in the therapeutic application of internal remedies: and there is no branch of medical practice where this is more marked than in the treatment of the diseases of the eye and ear. In the old-school practice you may count on one hand the internal remedies generally used, no matter what the disease may be. In fact for external local diseases of the eyes internal remedies are seldom given, while for deeper seated eye troubles a limited routine is the rule, with the usual iodide of potash when in doubt.

With full knowledge of all the local remedies and methods in general use, we know and use in addition the various well proved internal homeopathic remedies, the value of which is fully demonstrated in every day practice. Who will dare to doubt or dispute this, who has seen the magical effects of Apis Mel. Rhus Tox. or Kali Carbon. in oedema of the eyelids; or Hepar Sulph. in promoting absorption of pus in the anterior chamber, or of Calc. Carbon, Hepar Sulph, Arsen Alb and Conium in phlyctenular Opthalmia, or of Calc Carb, Silica, Calc. Phos. in Corneal opacities; or of the definite and almost immediate effects of Spigelia in certain forms of neuralgic pains in and about the eye; or of Pulsatilla in quieting the ear aches so