EDITORIAL.

Contributions of original articles, correspondence, etc., should be sent to the publishers, Otis Clapp & Son, Boston, Mass. Articles accepted with the understanding that they appear only in the Gazette. They should be typewritten if possible. To obtain insertion the following month, reports of societies and personal items must be received by the 15th of the month preceding.

PUBLISHERS' ANNOUNCEMENT.

The publishers of the New England Medical Gazette wish to call the attention of the profession to certain changes in the policy of that journal which will be inaugurated with the commencement in January of the thirty-seventh volume. A specialized and earnest attempt is to be made to bring each of this journal's several departments to a high degree of efficiency, and to render the physician the greatest possible assistance in his efforts to keep abreast of medical progress.

Thus the pithiest and most practical contributions only will be published, the most pertinent abstracts from the literature of the day, the best obtainable reports of society meetings and individual researches.

The Gazette will take special notice of the extension and advancement of homœopathy all over the world and endeavor to chronicle the changes and improvements in our therapeutical resources, such as provings and reprovings, the introduction of new adjuvants, etc. At the same time not neglecting to give adequate space to matter dealing with the important specialties into which professional work is being more and more resolved, such as surgery, gynecology, obstetrics, pediatrics, diseases of the nervous system, of the genitourinary system, of the eye, ear, nose, throat, chest, and skin, syphilis and kindred disorders.

A most interesting field, now being rapidly developed, is that of experimental research in the laboratory. The Gazette will endeavor to give trustworthy accounts of the results of these investigations, especially of those which promise to be of direct and immediate value in the prevention and limitation of infectious and contagious diseases.

It is hoped that very many items of general interest may appear from time to time, relating to the work of sanitariums, hospitals and colleges.

All the newest medical works and books on related subjects will be impartially noticed at length, so that the physician may be better able to determine what he wishes to read and to add to his library. Other publications and journals of general interest and merit will be grouped under the following headings: Editorially Speaking; Original Communications; Society Reports; Abstracts from Books and Journals; College, Hospital and Laboratory Notes; Books and Reading; Personal and General Items.

As co-editor with Dr. John L. Coffin of Boston, who has been for some years editor of the Gazette, the publishers have secured the services of Dr. A. Temple Lovering, also of Boston, a journalist of experience, and well known through sev eral successful books on medical and other subjects.

It is greatly hoped that the members of the homœopathic school of medicine will individually feel themselves invited to contribute brief original papers dealing with their personal experiences in the practice of medicine and surgery. The profession will confer a favor by sending items of general and personal interest, announcements of removals, appointments, and the like.

All contributions, exchanges, publications for review, subscriptions and all business and other communications should. be sent directly to the care of the publishers, 10 Park Square,

Boston.

The publishers feel justified in asking every physician who reads this announcement to respond with a year's subscription, which will be liberally returned to him in the form of twelve numbers of the Gazette, issued promptly monthly and replete with everything which will materially assist him in his work. OTIS CLAPP & SON, Publishers,

10 Park Square, Boston, Mass.

CONNECTICUT HOMEOPATHIC MEDICAL SOCIETY

SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION.

On the 17th and 18th inst., the Connecticut Homœopathic Medical Society observed their fiftieth anniversary. Judging from the extended report in the Hartford Courant for Nov. 19 and 20, the celebration was in every way a success. The exercises began on Monday afternoon at 3 o'clock with a business meeting, over which Dr. Charles E. Sanford, of Bridgeport, as president, presided. A detailed and interesting history of the Society was read by Dr. A. W. Phillips, of Derby, Conn. Dr. Bradford, of Philadelphia, Pa., presented an address on "Homoeopathy in the United States from 1851 to 1901." Dr. J. P. Sutherland, of Boston, spoke in his characteristic and interesting manner upon "The Homœopathic Materia Medica." The afternoon exercises closed with an address upon "Medical Colleges and Medical Education," by Dr. Pemberton Dudley, of Philadelphia.

Monday evening was devoted to a public meeting, at which there were several musical selections, an address by Dr. J. B. Rand, of Monson, Mass., on “The Relation of the Physician to the Patient," and an address by Prof. F. S. Luther, of Trinity College, on "The Relation of the Patient to the Physician." Prof. Luther, after speaking of the helplessness of the sick and their absolute dependence on the physician, goes on to speak of and to deplore the difference of opinion of the physicians. He says in part : "Within the memory of most of us, all men, sick and well alike, have become your patients. We are demanding not so much that you shall cure us when we are sick as that you shall prevent us from getting sick. Now it is in this larger range that the relation of patient to physician is least satisfactory. I venture to say that we, the patients, have some fault to find with you, the physicians. You are in many respects altogether too much like other people, too much like the rest of us. There is a good deal more disagreement among our doctors than we patients like to see. We have our lawyers, our soldiers, our delegates to the constitutional.

convention, to do our quarrelling. For our doctors and our ministers we want harmony and unity. And I think that the clergy are to-day further advanced toward agreement than the doctors are. The clergy at least deplore their differences and show traces of a desire to work together. Indeed, they do largely work together in the most essential and the most profitable of their activities. They unite in all sorts of associations for the exchange of views and for the conduct of enterprises looking to the betterment of mankind. They are doing this because they are coming to understand that their knowledge is but a small thing when compared with their ig norance and that the common end avowedly sought by all will be quickest attained by co-operation of all. So far they set most physicians a good example and the spectacle should stir your emulation. We patients are unable to comprehend a professionalism that has a barb wire fence around it. We laugh, if we are not sick ourselves, when we see that a doctor, feeling himself at a loss, will decline to consult save with those most likely to think his own thoughts and follow his own methods.

"I suppose I ought not to be saying this just here and now, especially as I have had some experience in the same line. Some years ago I addressed a company of physicians and ventured upon a few remarks which I feared would not be received with perfect cordiality. Well, they weren't. They produced a coldness such that the price of coal was raised twenty-five cents a ton the next day. Yet mark the sequel. Every one of the several doctors in the room whom I chanced to know personally took early occasion to say to me privately that for himself he deemed my opinions thoroughly sound, but that probably he was the only doctor in the room who agreed with me. Well, when loyalty to a sect, whether the sect be religious or scientific - when loyalty to a sect dulls the perceptions, cripples earnest effort, and sours sweet charity, then treason to the sect becomes the highest virtue.

Moreover, it is the apparent hostility of physicians to each other that is partly responsible for whatever of public distrust

causes you annoyance. I am speaking now of your patients. with that broad inclusiveness which looks upon all civilized peoples as in the hands of the physicians. Before this vast clientage, disagreements look like confessions of meager knowledge. They shake confidence. They bring into prominence and exaggerate the uncertainties of medical science. In every science it is the borderland of the unknown that is the battlefield. For the physicist, the chemist, and of late years for the biologist, there is a great and growing body of theory that is accepted by all and depended upon by everybody with absolute confidence. Yet there have been, in each of these lines of thought, revolutions as great as any that have taken place, or been attempted, in medicine. If the extent of indisputable acquirement in medical science is less than in some other sciences, less than we could wish, as it probably is, then that is all the more reason for frank public union as to all that has been gained; all the more reason for abandoning any differences that are merely artificial, conventional, sectarian. We, your patients in the broad sense, want to see our doctors get together, acknowledge their limitations, maintain their varying opinions as to doubtful matters stoutly, yet in the spirit of earnest seekers after truth."

Dr. T. Y. Kinne, of Patterson, N. J., gave an address on Samuel Hahnemann"

Tuesday morning the business session was occupied by the most interesting papers. The Hon. Charles E. Gross, of Hartford, gave an extended and most interesting "History of Medical Legislation." Other addresses were: "Progress of Medicine in Fifty Years," by Dr. George F. Laidlaw, of New York City; "Progress of Surgery in Fifty Years," by Dr. George W. Roberts, of New York City; and Dr. Horace Packard on "The Hospital in 1851 and 1901."

On Tuesday evening the Society and its invited guests closed its celebration with a banquet at the Allyn House. Dr. Ed. Beecher Hooker acted as toast-master. The toasts were responded to by the Rev. George W. Smith, President