conditions. No detail is too fine to escape his observation. One series of pictures shows the condition of the mucous membrances of the eye in various stages of trachoma, beginning with the congestion of the blood vessels in the acute stage, showing later beginning cicatrization, connective tissue formation, and lastly the pannus tenuis and trichiasis of old trachoma.

The work done in New Jersey in the war on the mosquito shows first ditching by the old method and the incidental benefit to the owner in the increased productivity of the land. Later we see the machine ditch at work removing sods weighing 400 pounds each. In the inland work the town board provides for pouring oil over the surface of pools in which larvae have been found. The finer grades of oil are found to spread better than the more viscid crude petroleum. This film shows also the actual hatching of the eggs, the larvae in repose hanging head downwards, the tip of the breathing tube at the surface of the water. Where the surface of the water is coated with oil no air can reach the tube and the smothered larva sinks slowly to the bottom of the pool. Finally after observing the pupa stage we see a mosquito emerge full grown and after resting a few moments fly away to alight on a man's hand and slowly gorge itself with blood. Typical breeding places are cleansed out and filled up with earth. As sewers are favorite breeding places oil is poured into them also. The war is aided by the larvae of the water beetle which devour the larvae of the mosquito. Children from the schools are taught to observe the larvae and to aid in the work of destruction.

A trip across the continent while the reel is changed finds the work being vigorously carried on in California. Officials, hospitals and quarantine stations are shown. Soon a boarding steamer comes alongside a vessel from a foreign port and a rigid inspection of passengers and crew follows.

The quarantine officer has always to know the sanitary history of the voyage,

the personality of the captain, the liklihood of concealed infection, the attitude of the ship's surgeon and the kind of cargo carried. In the bulletin on maritime quarantine Cofer says, "His decision is expected to afford protection to the community and yet to act as a sanitary sieve and not as a dam to commerce."

When necessary, persons are taken to the station for disinfection. As they are landed their effects are placed on a large car in wire baskets or loose canvas bags which are checked. The car is at once wheeled along a track into Kinyoun-Francis disinfecting chamber so arranged as to be used with jetting steam, steam under pressure, with formaldehyde gas alone or with gas and dry heat.

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All the hawsers of the steamer are protected from the passage back and forth of rats by the application of large circular guards fastened about the ropes. In the hold of the vessel huge pots of burning sulphur are placed in vessels of water, live steam is released and the hatches fastened down, and all openings are sealed. An atmosphere 4.5 per cent. of sulphur dioxide can be obtained by burning five pounds of sulphur per 1,000 cubic feet of space. This amount would require the volatilization of about one pint of water. Twenty-four hours are required for bacterial infections. After the fumigation is complete, covering is removed and any dead rats are collected.

The scene shifts to the examining room where Japanese emigrants are waiting in line to be examined for trachoma before final admission to this country.

In San Francisco a rat-proof dwelling and barn are shown with good foundations and screened windows, and doors that fit. The preparation of rat poison placing it on pieces of bread, planting and setting traps, collecting and tagging rats from traps in barns and sewers and the report to the collector illustrate possibilities in rat extermination.

The destruction of the ground squirrel another plague carrier, calls for a different procedure. An inspector rides

out on horseback, goes over tracts of land and serves to the owner legal notice of the presence of the ground squirrel. Shortly after a small army appears each armed with a pick and with a small force pump with a generator and a rubber tube attachment. The tube is placed in the opening of the burrow, dirt is packed about it with the pick the generator is started, and the deadly gas is rapidly pumped into the hole. The operations are continued until all the field has been covered. The postmortem examination of the ground squirrel, the microscopical examination of a culture from a rat and the combing of a rat for fleas are pictured.

That the department is active in preventing not only the importation of and spread of communicable diseases, but is also concerning its self with the class of citizens admitted to this country is shown by pictures of receiving station at Ellis Island. The line of emigrants leaving the ship is conducted to various

departments where physical examinations and mental tests are held. Throats, eyes, chests are examined for possible disease and tests are employed to discover mental defects. Any person having an infectious disease is hurried to the hospital where he is given proper treatment until cured. Having passed all tests and having been released from the hospital these citizens in embryo are yet to be subjected to many tests before their final fitness is determined. The importance of protecting this country from the emigrant having hereditary defects is recognized. From these few pictures some conception of the nature of the work may be obtained. The mili tary discipline and accuracy which prevail give assurance of the reliability of results. The value of the Public Health Service in promoting health, in protecting property and in giving stability to other work of the government is inestimable. In every great enterprise the sanitary expert is the pioneer.

At the recent meeting of the Ameri can Medical Association it was noted that less than fifty men attended the meetings of, or were registered in the therapeutic section, while more than ten times that number both registered in and attended the sessions of the surgical section. Was it because there was nothing particularly new to be obtained through listening to papers on therapeutic subjects, or were these papers worthless because of the fact that the readers knew but little of the subjects considered, or is it not the style to give attention to the treatment of disease through the use of drugs, chemicals and other therapeutic agents.

With such a small showing as this in the section on therapeutics it is little to be wondered at that the regular doctor is said to have such a slight knowledge of drugs as to be unable to prescribe them properly, or to know what drug or

other agent to employ under certain indications. It looks very much as though we of the medical profession, and more particularly the regulars, were followers of fads and that surgery happened to be the particular one of popularity at this time.

We have an American Therapeutic Society with a membership limited to one hundred, and this again looks as though the consideration of drugs and their applications were to be taken as a secondary matter. In fact there is every indication that internal medicine, in so far as applied therapeutics may be concerned, is a thing of the past. We have ceased studying tools of this sort to a very great extent and are giving more of our attention to surgery and other special lines of work in which there is more money than in internal medicine. Or at least that is the way it appears to the onlooker. It is true that the internist

does not do as well, in a monetary way as does the surgeon, even though his ultimate results may be equally as brilliant.

The fact of the limited attendance at the section on therapeutics shows very plainly that but few of us are in the ranks of the real doctor, the man who would endeavor to get results through the use of drugs. We have been told, time and again, that drugs are practically worthless and we have seen the list of such agents cut down in number year after year, until today the official drug agents are comparatively few, and that despite the fact that workers in the field, men who have seen results, have told us that many of those on the taboo list are active and worthy of use.

We have listened to the professors of the faculty and been told that it is practically useless to administer drugs in the majority of cases presenting, and many of us have accepted their words as final. We have not, however, looked into the history of such men to any very great extent and do not know that they are ones who have had any very great experience in the use of such agents. Those of us who have followed up and taken into consideration the past lives of such men have frequently found that they give much more attention to teaching than to actual practice of medicine and that they base their ideas and sayings upon laboratory findings rather than upon experience gained in active practice. Many of these members of the faculty are salaried men who have so much to do in connection with college work as not to allow them any time to speak of for active practice. Many of them do not give any attention to the clinical work in connection with their schools. Their teaching is practically all of a didactic nature. Still they would tell us that the list of drugs should be limited; that where several drugs have practically the same effect, all but one, or possibly two, should be all that are necessary to retain in the official list. They would have us retain belladonna and discard hyoscyamus, as both have

similar actions, and further for the reason that the first mentioned is very frequently more active than is the latter. They do not realize that the actions are not absolutely identical in all cases and that very frequently hyoscyamus, or its alkaloids, hyoscine and hyoscyamine are preferable to belladonna or its alkaloid, atropine. They show very conclusively that they have not given all drugs and their actions and effects sufficiently close study. They would have us discard many of the cathartic agents, for the simple reason that one or two will do the work, and regardless of the fact that many on the taboo list are equally efficient and at times preferable of use.

We

There was a time when we all treated diseases as entireties and without attention to individual indications. considered that pneumonia in one person was identical with that in another and that the medication for one case would fit in very nicely in all others. There are many of us who seemingly cling to this idea. This is one of the greatest reasons for the therapeutic nihilism which has been rampant in the American for medical profession I am years. speaking of the regular profession. This has not been true with the homeopaths or the eclectics, as the men of these schools have studied their drug agents in a different manner than have the regulars. They have disregarded diseases as entireties and have given their attention to the consideration of individual conditions or indications for single remedial agents. They have administered only those drugs which they have found to be indicated at various times during the course of a disease and in addition their resports of cases show that they have gotten results, even though employing many agents now on the taboo list of the regulars.

These schools outside the regular ranks have been ridiculed and subjected to the scorn of many of us, but nevertheless we have much to learn from them. If we look over the reports of their meetings we will see that their sections of therapeutics are invariably

well attended and that they are always endeavoring to give closer study to the matter of internal medication. We find that many papers on the subject of applied therapeutics are read and that the discussions

thereon are voluminous.

They are always endeavoring to perfect their knowledge of drugs and their applications and in consequence becoming better doctors.

The eclectics taught us much of plant drugs. That is they showed us the specific applications of these agents under certain conditions, and had it not been for their teachings we would still be buried as deep in the mire of empiricism as was the case with our forefathers. This school showed us, and very conclusively, that certain plaint drugs, administered under certain known conditions, would bring certain results. They also showed us the manner of use of these agents. While we may not believe wholly in the theory of the homeopathic school, we are obliged to give them credit for having drawn our attention to the symptoms or indications as expressed in the different pathologic conditions, and likewise should we thank them for having shown us that huge doses of medicants were not absolutely necessary.

The great trouble with the regular profession lies in the fact that its members, or at least many of them, consider themselves the peer of all others. They place themselves upon a pedestal from which they look down and ridicule all others not within their own particular school. They will not accept the findings of the members of other schools, not even when shown that such findings are worthy of some respect. In other words many of the regulars are not doctors in the truest sense of the word, in that they are narrow and will not accept the teaching of other than their own particular school. Quite an appreciable number of the therapeutic teachers are of this class of men.

The eclectics in particular, through results obtained, have forced the regulars to administer more medicine in the

treatment of diseases, and for the simple reason that the laity has noted that the former frequently get results where failures have followed the attempts of the drugless regulars. The electics showed us that many of the acute infections might be aborted, that they were not "self limited," and we were thus obliged to do more for our patients than merely "look on" while they were fighting microbic action.

We are not doctors, we of the regulars, for the simple reason that one of the most important things in medicine, the use of therapeutic agents, properly applied, has not been given the proper attention by our schools. We are turned out to practice medicine with a vast fund of pathologic, surgical and other knowledge, but with but little of applied therapeutics and when we meet with a condition know but little of what to administer to bring our patients relief. If we were properly taught we would not lock up a bowel carrying an irritation, but would give Nature assistance in her efforts to rid the economy of the disease producing cause. We would not allow the fever of pneumonia to continue indefinitely, with associated congestion of the lung tissue, thus favoring the growth of the pneumococcus therein, but would endeavor to lower the temperature and throw the blood to the surfaces, thus giving the bacteria less upon which to feed. It was the electic who first used veratrum in pneumonia, and the application of this drug was rational, and we regulars who have subsequently employed it have found that it acts to abort the condition and to remove it from the "self limited" disease list.

No, we regulars are not real doctors, not by any means. Nor will we be such until we descend from our pedestal and mingle with the men who are accomplishing things with drugs. Nor will we be real doctors until we drop the fads associated with the profession and give more study to our tools and their applications. We must have a better showing in our therapeutic sections than during the past few years if we would not

be ridiculed and told that we know not enough of drugs to properly write a prescription, or to properly apply our remedies. We must wake up, and that in the very near future, or else quit the practice of internal medicine, as we will never be successful practitioners if we cling to the ideas put forth by the therapeutic nihilists. Those few of us who have given internal medication close study and attention have found that many things said by the so-called authorities are almost, if not quite, wrong. We have been told that intestinal antiseptics are worthless, or nearly so, but have gone on employing them, nevertheless, and found that they have given us results of a very satisfactory nature. When we cease listening to the few and accept the findings, of the many, then will be become real doctors, and not until such time. When we see as many doctors attending the sessions of the therapeutic sections as are found within those devoted to surgery, then will we become better doctors. Therapeutics are as necessary as is the scalpel, the hemostat or any other surgical instrument, and are equally as great life savers, if properly applied.

IN THE RAILWAY CARRIAGE.

"The British custom of locking passengers into compartments in railway carriages,' says an American railway man, "is productive of all manner of curious and amusing results.

"On one occasion I was a witness of this one: At one station a woman with a lorgnette entered. She gazed sternly on the man opposite. Before seating herself she opened the carriage window and sent it down with a bang. At the next station another woman entered. As she sat down she gave a look at the open window and shivered pathetically. Then she shot an appealing glance in the direction of the male person. 'I shall be frozen to death!' she cried. "If that window is closed I shall suffocate!' retorted the woman with the lorgnette.

"Just then the porter came around. At the request of the second woman he be

said the vicar. "Now, what improvement have you noticed especially in little Willie of late?"

"Well, he's arranged our penny-in-theslot gas meter so that we get our gas for nothing. You see, he's moved it from the scullery to outside the front door, sir."

"But you still have to put your pennies in the slot, my good woman!"

"Ah, but you see, sir, before he put the meter in the road our Willie wrote 'Chocolates' over the slot!"-London Answers.

AN UNDESIRABLE.

The new baby had proved itself the possessor of extraordinary lung powers. One day baby's brother, little Johnny, said to his mother:

"Ma, little brother came from heaven, didn't he?"

"Yes, dear," answered the mother. Johnny was silent for a minute, and then went on:

"I say, ma."

"What is it, Johnny?"

"I don't blame the angels for slinging him out, do you?"-Tit-Bits.