POST GRADUATE ALUMNI. The doctors attending the Post Graduate Course of the Chicago Homœopathic College, on the afternoon of March 30, 1892, organized the Post Graduate Alumni Association of the Chicago Homeopathic College. Edwin Gillard, M.D., of Sandusky, O., was elected President; Geo. W. Pringle, M.D., of Midland, Mich., Vice-President; Lorenzo N. Grosvenor, M.D., of Chicago, Secretary and Treasurer.

All who have a certificate of attendance on a Post Graduate Course at the Chicago Homœopathic College, are cordially invited to become members. Send name, address, and fifty cents to the Secretary and Treasurer, Lorenzo N. Grosvenor, 185 Lincoln Avenue, Chicago, Ill.

THE Homeopathic Journal of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Pedology for May is a notable number. It is increased in size to 112 pages, and is entirely devoted to the disscussion of the question of laceration of the perineum. At the December (1891) meeting of the American Obstetrical Society, Dr. George Clinton Jeffrey, of Brooklyn, N. Y., read an address, entitled "A Reasonable Protest Against Immediate Perineorrhaphy," in which he took strong grounds in favor of the delayed, or secondary, operation for repair. This somewhat startling paper elicited so much disapproval among those present at the meeting, that Dr. Winterburn determined to give a fair opportunity for a full expression of opinion on this important subject. The result is a Symposium, of thirty papers, by prominent obstetricians and gynecologists in different parts of the country.

IMPORTANT NOTICE AND REMOVAL. To avoid failure or doubtful success in use of Peroxide of Hydrogen, be sure you get Marchand's Medicinal; no substitute can replace it, statements of dealers, interested or unscrupulous parties to the contrary notwithstanding. There is great inducement to substitute in this article, for the reason that Peroxide made for bleaching and varying trade purposes costs to produce only a fraction of what Marchand's Medicinal costs, and the unscrupulous druggist or dealer pockets the difference in profit at the expense of the physician's reputation for skill and Marchand's Peroxide of Hydrogen Medicinal.

Put up in 4-oz., 8.oz., and 16-oz. bottles only, with which every careful physician should be familiar, in order to frustrate dishonest substitution and assure success in practice. Drevet Manufacturing Co., 28 Prince Street, New York.

THE Homœopathic Medical College of Missouri held its thirty-third annual commencement exercises at Pick-Wick Theatre, St. Louis, on the evening of March 17th, and graduated seven M. D's. Owing to the rigorous adhesion to the three years' course of study, there were not more; but in consideration of the fact that the older colleges of the dominant school only graduated from fifteen to twenty, the management feel satisfied with the work of the term past.

The exercises were interspersed with the vocal and instrumental selections of the best musicians of the city; the address on behalf of the Faculty was delivered by Rev. J. J. O'Brien, subject "The Elements of Success." The degree of Doctor of Medicine was conferred upon Ferdinand Brase, Helene A. Goerke, Thos. J. Jones, Clara Louise Toby, Emma C. F. Wentzel, E. Wilson Taylor, and Paul N. Zilliken, by the President of the Board of Trustees, Dr W. A. Edmonds. Prof. I. D. Foulon awarded the prizes and flowers in his usual happy style.

WESTBORO' Hospital (says a correspondent of the local paper.) - was lately examined with much interest and attention by the joint committee upon charitable institutions: Hon. Wm. E. Mead, chairman for the senate, and C. Stillman Blanchard, Esq., chairman for the house, and the house committee of finance, Malcolm E. Rideoute, Esq., chairman. These gentlemen will recommend the suitable sums for appropriations. Westboro' is in need of fostering aid. Many enlargements and betterments are required. The good work would go on still better if more could be used for current expenses. The best modes of treatment call for an amount and quality of nursing that cannot be given for the $3.97 per week, which was last year paid out here. Unfortunately there is a strong pressure for even a lower rate than that. The late superintendent, Dr. N. Emmons Paine, uniformly said that with perhaps one half more outlay the rate of recoveries, reckoned upon the newly admitted, could be raised from such as that of last year, 35.77 per cent., to 50 per cent. This would mean a large abatement of human weakness and misery. Fi nancially would it not be better to expend more at once, and thus preclude, it might be, four times the cost in supporting hopelessly insane people for many years?

THE

NEW-ENGLAND MEDICAL GAZETTE.

No. 6.

JUNE, 1892.

VOL. XXVII.

Contributions of original articles, correspondence, personal items, etc., should be sent to the publishers, Boston, Mass.

EDITORIAL.

10:1

ARE PARTY LINES DISAPPEARING?"

Are the lines which separate the old school from the new school of medicine disappearing? Are these schools, in both of which are thousands upon thousands of educated, conscientious, earnest men and women working toward one common endthe rescue of humanity from the physical ills to which it is heir -learning to work, not indeed in unity, but in fraternity and in concord? That is a question which not only the student of medical affairs, but the philosopher, the student of sociology, must ever and again be interested in asking himself. It is a question which is asked, editorially, in a recent issue of the Medical Times, and there receives a highly optimistic answer. The answer is supplied, in part, by a quotation from the Cincinnati Lancet-Clinic, in which that excellent journal points out how many differences of theory and practice between the schools are being yearly swept away; and from this fact draws the inference that in a few years all differences of any moment will be done away with, and the schools find themselves as one. Would that the inference were one which would bear the searching tests of fact and reason! The gain to science and to humanity from the honest, scholarly men of both schools working together in hearty, mutual helpfulness would be something incalculable, something millennial. But the day of that possibility is yet far. The pleasant, optimistic inference of the Times and the LancetClinic cannot stand, because it rests on altogether unsound

VOL. XXVII. No. 6.

253

premises. It assumes that the gulf between the schools is one dug by difference of scientific opinion. Were that the case, it would be solidly and permanently bridged in a twelvemonth. It is a gulf dug by commercialism, and by mad, unscrupulous prejudice. It is a gulf which, as the world grows in clear-sightedness and honesty, may in time be filled up; though we venture to guess it will not be by the labor of physicians, but by the healthy compulsion of public opinion. Meanwhile nothing can be gained by a smooth and smiling ignoring of the nature of the gulf, and the fact of who digs it. If differences of scientific opinion were alone responsible for it, as has been said, its bridging would be neither a long nor a formidable matter. The homœopathists would be allowed to state their position; which, we take it, would be their belief, as the one raison d'être of their being homœopathists at all, in the efficacy of the rule of similars as a guiding principle in drug-prescribing. Having stated their position, they would ask an honest test of this rule by the opposing school of practice; a fair test by individuals, with candid report of results; a fair public test in every great hospital in the land, under exactly corresponding sanitary conditions, of the old school and new school methods of treatment; patient for patient; disease for disease; the results to be publicly reported at the end of a period to be fixed by mutual agreement. Every honest man in the allopathic ranks would realize that such are not the demands and the statements of charlatans; and what homoopathist doubts that from such a test homoeopathy would come out with the triumphant right, granted by every honest observer in the old school, thenceforth to stand as an honorable therapeutic specialty in the ranks of scientific medicine!

Can the most optimistic believer in the approaching union of the schools see the very slightest hope of homoeopathy having such a hearing or such a test from its traditional opponents? The question provokes no answer but a smile. The opposition to homœopathy rests on no basis of outraged science or principle, but simply on outraged prejudice and commercialism. It is not an opposition of argument, but of abuse; not of the sword at mid-day, but of the bludgeon in the dark; not of reason, but of vituperation and falsehood. Where is the old-school journal

that is willing to meet a new-school journal in open, courteous, rational discussion of principles involved in their differences? Where is the old-school medical society willing to ask a homœopathic physician to present a paper on his therapeutic specialty for their refutation? The attitude of the old school toward the new school to-day is practically that of fifty years ago, with the inflammation of rage that comes from the consciousness of impotency. We would urge upon our optimistic contemporaries the following quotations from an address lately delivered before the graduating class of a prominent old-school medical college, and reprinted in that journalistic treasure-house of bad eggs, The Medical News :

"Nowhere else is this fact so certainly seen as in the history and actual outworkings of that consummate example of civilized quackery called homœopathy. An hour's study of Hahnemann's works would convince any convincible person that this sorry specimen of nineteenth-century medievalism is a disgrace to civilization; and yet it is fashionable. Laughed out of Europe, it has sought and found a home among Americans, infinitely receptive of every form of opera bouffe, whimsicality and rampant rascality. If its lay adherents had the faintest conception of the hideous absurdities on which it is built, and the trickery by which it lives, they would be sickened with disgust.

"It cannot escape the observation of any one who wishes to see facts as they are, that the great mass of homœopathists, by pure necessity, have in practice entirely abandoned the whole crazy nonsense of Hahnemannian mumbo-jumbo, and cling only to the name for purely commercial reasons. The great homoeopathist, Guernsey, he, probably, who supplied "Dr." Swan with his sample or graft of "catarrhus nasi," says that there is in New York City to-day no exclusive homœopathic practitioner. Any fool knows that no disease can be influenced or cured by the mediaval drivel of potentizations, shakings, smellings, similias, etc. But a lot of silly women have got it into their heads that this is a 'nice' and a 'new' school, and these mountebanks, while giving common drugs in physiologic doses, are willing to sail under false colors for the sake of the practice it brings. It is a sickening fact, but fact it is.

"Combination is the order of the day in the world of trade. What is thus done for selfish reasons may be done for unselfish ones. The patent-medicine men have got every druggist and every newspaper in America in their determined grip. The homoeopathists meet in National and International conventions, and devote their entire energies and time to schemes for getting State and Governmental money and aid, and for grasping every point of pecuniary and social advantage. In our lofty scorn of such low cunning, and in our intense preoccupation with disease and its cure, we never raise a finger toward meeting such attack, never pass a resolution to set Legislatures right, never try to instruct the public in its medical duties and self-interest. If, as a profession, we did not devote a tenth of our collective energy and intellect to these things, quackery would disappear. The medical profession is

shut within itself. It has no means or machinery for reaching the public ear. The few thousand quacks occupy the field; the public hears from them always and emphatically."

Gentlemen the optimists, what do you make of this? Can you point out any softened difference of note in this dear, familiar, blood-thirsty, mad-bull bellow? Is it desirable that we conciliatorily near the gulf, with a view to closer approach to this infuriated taurine? As a rule, gentlemen do not argue with mad bulls; they wait for the custodians of public safety to come and shoot them. That is what will happen to the mad-bull species of allopathic opposition, if we only wait long enough; the sturdy rifle of public opinion will permanently quiet its bellow. Meanwhile, gentlemen the optimists, weigh the sensitive honesty, the sound logic of this address of Dr. George Gould, delivered, with applause, in this year of Our Lord, and ask yourself what reason and honesty have to do with making or bridging the gulf across which the mad bull bellows. Weigh only these few points: I. The old, unabandoned fashion beautifully embodied in this address of refusing to recognize homœopathy's right to outgrow the errors and mistakes once identified with its principles, while glorying in the right of "regular" medicine to outgrow the infinitely more monstrous errors and mistakes which once were the only principles it could boast.

II. The courteous, gracious, well-bred temperance of phrase, so characteristic of allopathic arguments in every discussion of this sort.

III. The dear, familiar "shudder of disgust" with which the experimenters with that chaste and cleanly medicament, Dr. Brown-Sequard's elixir of life, reproach all homoeopathy, because a few so-called homoeopathists, ridiculed by the majority of their confrères, utilize a few nasty medicaments in their practice.

IV. And, lastly. The novel, the unmatchable, the gorgeous "nerve" of picturing the homoeopathists as wishing to besiege legislative halls with clamor for place and right, while the old school, in its "lofty scorn of low cunning, in its intense preoccupation with disease and its cure, never raised a finger to set Legislatures right"!!! Consider the fact that homœopathy has scarcely entered a legislative hall, save to utter manly protest against the cowardly attacks there making by allopathy