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value to science of both is nil. Yet lac caninum may, because of its hundreds of "clinical verifications," be respectfully catalogued by scientific gentlemen who would smile compassionately at the "clinical verifications," in the homely vernacular called "testimonials," offered by "Paget's Pain Palliator." Yet after all, what sound testimony to values is there in the one case that there is not in the other?

The scientific mind can recognize but one condition under which "clinical verifications" can be of value; namely, when they outnumber clinical nullifications of the same drug, when compared with these in parallel column. Which is to say, that when the sphere of homoeopathy is deserted for that of empiricismwhich is done whenever we deal with the action of drugs having no reliable pathogenesy - we should at least adopt the best methods of empiricism, and seek records of the cases in which the drug has been unsuccessfully administered, and cases under which recovery from the disease-condition has been made when no drug was administered. It is only when such cases are put in comparison with the "verifications" that the latter can claim any solid value.

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Homœopathy stands so sadly to-day in need of the best service of her best minds - service in building up a clean and strong drug-pathogenesy on which, and on which alone, scientific homoeopathic practice can safely and proudly rest that for homoeopathy's best minds to lend themselves, though ever so little, to the service of empiricism, by methods to whose fallacy the whole history of old-school practice bears age-long testimony, seemed a risk over which the GAZETTE, from the depths of a friendly heart, ventured to sigh. And if this sigh has voiced. itself in phrase too frank, the friendliness which breathes through it all must plead excuse.

EDITORIAL NOTES AND COMMENTS.

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"WHAT'S IN A NAME?" may, in good-humored irony, be asked of the gentleman who, judging from a recent communication to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, seems to be under the impression that to change the name of a medicinal agent will alter

the facts of its history. The gentleman in question is Dr. Kenelm Winslow; and the drug, on whose properties he discourses, is glonoin. With a reasonableness akin to that of the head-hiding ostrich, this writer refers to our old homoeopathic stand-by under the extraordinary and meaningless name of glenoine; thereby proving his timorous conviction that to call the drug by the name bestowed upon it by the famous homoeopathist who introduced it to America, were to expose, too flagrantly, his own absurdity in treating of the drug as a recent and valuable discovery by allopathy. This caution comes too late; since, apparently unknown to him, authoritative writers of his own schoolRobert T. Edes and Farquharson, for example-have already accepted and employed in good faith the name glonoin, recogn izing, doubtless, the sound, scientific reasons which influenced Dr. Constantine Hering in thus christening the substance which he had the honor of introducing to the medical profession nearly fifty years ago. These reasons it may not be uninteresting for us to recall in Dr. Hering's own words:

"But above all things the child required a name. Sobrero had not considered one necessary, and the gun-cotton had not even been chemically christened, so I coined a name from the components glycerine, or hydrate of glycyl-oxide with nitrosulphuric acid gave the product. The sulphuric acid and the water remaining, our substance was Glycyl Oxyd and Nitrogen Oxygen, the latter perhaps as nitric acid, and the elements of the first transferred to alkalies. All this we did not even know how to investigate, and were obliged to wait for adepts to discover it. But the name could not wait, so to Gl. O. N. 0. inum was added, to designate what is derived, abbreviating which we had the euphonic and significant name of glonoin, the i long and accented.'

Some years later Hering wrote: "Since analysis has shown that it is not a compound of nitric acid and glycerine, but a newformed combination, the name nitro-glycerine ought to be left to exploders and their working-men. The name glonoin is formed according to the custom of all the great explorers, from the initials of the elements and compounds in combination, like aldehyde, and several others."

Petty puerilities are many in the history of the relations of the old school and new, in the way of efforts to ignore, in all imagin able ways, the credit due homoeopathy for its contributions to

medical science. But this pleasant jest of changing one letter in an old familiar drug-name strikes us as among the drollest of such puerilities, lately to be observed.

THE PERILS OF SENTIMENTAL FICTION. - The mischief done by sentimental fiction as an etiological factor in many abuses and aberrations, should not be overlooked by thoughtful physicians, or by the parents and guardians of youth, whose opinions such physicians may often help to form. It is a queer fact that parents closely overwatch in health, and physicians assiduously inquire into and regulate, in sickness, the foods which go to nourish and build up the bodies of the young under their care; while the books, which are as the diet of mind and soul, are very rarely made the subject of inquiry or regulation by either. Such a negligence is especially odd, and especially unpardonable in these days when hypnotism and "mind-cure" demonstrate to us the marvellous power of spirit over matter, and how a fixed idea of an unwholesome sort may lead by a straight, short road to diseased physical conditions, and how a trained and resolute will may practically, and for a long time, nullify physical ills. Beyond all question, the books that are read by the young are responsible, to an incalculable degree, for the birth of impulses and the training of the will for good or evil. In all cases of nervous desease, especially of the hysterical sort, a close inspection of the patient's library may be followed by as useful results as a close inspection of the patient's diet-list. Everything pessimistic, everything morbidly sentimental, everything even remotely erotic should be hunted down and banished from the mental pabulum as intelligently and definitely as anything indigestible or dangerously stimulating from the physical. Literary therapeutics will yet become a useful branch of that liberal modern. medical practice which aims to treat the patient as a whole, and is powerful and wise in treating the mind through the mind, as the body through the body.

No one who intelligently followed, in detail, the testimony in the shocking Ward-Mitchell case, and especially the letters that passed between the wretched girls, can fail to be struck by the fact that many passages in the letters read like verbatim quota

tions from the crassly silly and erotic novels, which too often form the sole mental food of young people of their type. There can be little doubt that more than one seed which blossomed to the black flower of that sickening tragedy was sown by precisely such books, read and assimilated by those callow and too receptive and in one case at least - hereditarily unhealthy young There can be little doubt that hundreds of thousands of such seeds, destined to blossoming only less black, are being sown the length and breadth of our land by cheap, foolish, coarse novels, read and mused upon by foolish, immature minds. It is no fanciful danger; it is no whimsical hint which we thus seek to give to the physicians whose household influence is so widespread and so vital.

women.

THE CHOLERA IN EUROPE is, it is true, a subject of less momentous importance to-day than in the days when the appearance of the dreaded scourge on one side of the ocean was the immediate and inevitable avant courier of its appearance on the other. Vigilance, born of dear-bought experience, and improvement in quarantine matters, are to be thanked for the hopeful fact that one European cholera epidemic, of serious severity, waxed and waned a few years ago without at all affecting America. There is every indication that the present visitation of cholera to Russia, France, and elsewhere, will cease as harmlessly, so far as we are concerned. Nevertheless, as when the war-cloud on the horizon is no larger than a man's hand, it is sane and safe to give a comprehensive study to defences and military resources, so when a disease-epidemic is but a speck in the distance it is no bad idea to search out the weak places in our sanitary armor, which it would certainly and disastrously find should it travel our way. In the course of such search it might be a surprise to hygienists to discover that many of these danger-spots are not confined to the squalors of the slums, but exist in quarters where the sanitarian would hardly dream of turning his search-light. For a single instance-in what is popularly known as the "court end" of the city of Boston, most of the householders leave town for a long vacation season. In many instances their houses are not altogether

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closed, servants or other care-takers being left in charge. rarely in summer do the refuse carts visit this section of the city. that waste food not infrequently overflows the accommodation for it, putrefies in the hot air, with results which fail to attract the attention of the city authorities as promptly as they would attract the attention of the cholera microbes. Again, according to the statement of a leading newspaper, it has lately been discovered that in a pleasant and populous street within city limits there is a block of twenty houses which never have been connected with a sewer, and whose sewerage drains into a creek connected with a brook. How promising a cholera-trap this!

It is not to be supposed that Boston is alone or even prominent among American cities in permitting and overlooking such crying and dangerous sins against good sanitation as those instanced above, and whose list might easily be extended. But with even the smallest cloud of a possible epidemic on the horizon, it were well for every physician, every sanitarian, every public-spirited citizen to do his personal utmost toward the exposure and correction of every such evil that comes within his knowledge.

COMMUNICATIONS.

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HOMEOPATHY AND THE INSANE.

BY N. EMMONS PAINE, M.D., WEST NEWTON, MASS.

[Read before the American Institute of Homeopathy.]

With

Until very recent years the insane of the whole world have been cared for in asylums under old-school management. the exception of one country, the same statement is true to-day. That one land where an insane man is accorded his medical rights is our own. Yet this declaration must not be received too broadly, as we look about and recognize in how few States of the Union this right is enjoyed. Three States only have done their duty, and they are New York, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. Each of them has chartered a State homoeopathic hospital. Michigan follows, at a distance, with a State institution under homœopathic control, but not homoeopathic by legal requirements; and Connecticut is supplying the lack through private enterprise.

In five, then, of the forty-four States an insane homœopath may be treated by his chosen school of medicine. What is the

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