of the medical examiner are the very interesting diseases relating to the ductless glands. One very striking case was a young woman who had been treated by twelve physicians, all of whom thought she was a neurasthenic. There seemed to be nothing particularly the matter. She had been unable to work consecutively at her position. She began to menstruate one night, and the next morning was found dead in bed. On examination of the body, there was a suspicious pigmentation about the knees and autopsy revealed complete absence of the adrenals.

Thymus death comes very frequently under the observation of the medical examiner. The types of this are many, always from inadequate cause. An individual who had paraded one afternoon, preparing for a formal parade later, while on his way home became unconscious. He was found on the street, and died within a few minutes.

A man started to run after a fire engine, across a field, and was found dead the next day.

An individual in a boat which tips over, dies apparently of drowning, but is taken out of the water before drowning could possibly occur. Examination of the body shows that shock and fright have resulted in death, without any evidence of drowning.

We have deaths in individuals who have been under an anesthetic, notably in primary anesthesia. The deaths in most of these cases result from the administration of the anesthetic for tonsils and adenoids.

People die from infectious processes which are often overlooked, or perhaps there has been so little suspicion of it that no physician has been called. I have in mind a case of spinal menengitis whose whole course ran over a period of less than eight hours. There was an extremely active process.

I could go on indefinitely, giving you types of cases that we run into. It is amazing that tuberculosis furnishes a considerable percentage of sudden deaths, oftentimes without warning. The individual has not been well, and death suddenly comes, frequently with hemorrhage. Pneumonia is a frequent cause of sudden death. Typhoid fever occasionally causes sudden death, the individual in these cases being placed in that walk of life where the employment of a physician means an expenditure which he does not desire to make, that is, occurring among poor individuals picked up in lodging houses; not the acute typhoid, but one in which the individual has been walking about for some time before his death.

The duties of the medical examiner include the investigation particularly of the type of case in which another individual may have played a part, no matter how innocently, in the production of the death. Where a man dies as a result of a railroad accident, or as the result of the action of machinery, it is the duty of the medical examiner to prepare for an inquest and

report to the courts. In contrast to the old courts where the coroner called in a jury and the jury heard the case in this State that function of the coroner is carried out by the municipal courts. A man who is accustomed to hear such cases judges whether another person is criminally responsible for the death. It is possible for the medical examiner and for the district attorney to carry a case to a higher court after the inquest court has decided that no one is responsible for a death, and this is occasionally done. There was one case in which a hearing was given in one of the lower courts, and the individuals who were believed responsible for the death were acquitted. In spite of that, because of a belief that they were guilty, that case is going up at present to the higher courts.

This, then, shows what in general the medical examiner does. In Suffolk County the number of deaths investigated for a year run about two hundred-more in the southern district than the northern. In many cases the examination consists in viewing the body, in more cases in autopsies, and in further investigation into the character of the case. The medical examiner works in association with the police, and very close co-operation exists here between the police and medical examiner service.

The matter of publicity in the case of suicide is one which we try to eliminate. If a death occurs by an unusual method of suicide, often within a very short time following there will be others in imitation. The newspapers reported a striking case of an old woman who had thrust her head and part of her body into the oven of a gas stove, and after piling blankets and pillows around her, she turned on the gas. Within twenty-four hours we had a similar case, where another woman committed suicide in the same way. The police department of the city of Boston is necessarily in close relation to the newspapers, and it is the custom where the police hear of a suicide, to post a notice in police headquarters, indicating that a suicide has been committed and the manner of it. In such cases, if the medical examiner were called in, the police could be kept out of the case. If the medical examiner is perfectly satisfied that death is self-inflicted, there need be no publicity. I want to suggest to you, as medical men and women, that if you are dealing with cases of suicide and would shun publicity, call the medical examiner directly and do not permit the police to be notified, because that means necessary and immediate publicity. I have no objection to publicity where it is desired, but it seems to me the publication of the details of suicide should be discouraged and avoided.

THE NATURAL DIET AND CANCER.

BY BENJ. C. WOODBURY, JR., M.D., Portsmouth, N. H.

The present writer has for some time been interested in obtaining corroboration of a theory that has only lately taken shape and been enhanced by certain contemporary writings, chief among which may be said to be the teachings of Nature Cure both of the German and American Schools.

In early childhood, we were instructed to eat only whole wheat bread, the best available type of this flour being the product of the Franklin Mills. Furthermore, our attention was called to the fact that children who were fed upon whole meal flour or even the old-time middling, or home-raised rye and wheat which was taken to the mill and returned to the owner in toto (fleur, middling and bran), providing that they, at the same time. were not freely indulged in candy and other sweets, developed strong and well-shaped teeth, fine quality of hair and in general better nourished bodies.

These are in part the teachings of the German chemist, Julius Hensel, whose "Macrobiotic, or Our Diseases and Our Remedies," while crude in many respects, contains many interesting facts relative to the proper food ingredients for the healthy body. Furthermore, his little book, "Bread from Stones," dealing with pulverized stone and its use as a fertilizer, should command the respect of thinking Americans. Likewise, certain of the teachings of Schussler, popularly called Biochemistry, have always been of absorbing interest. Therefore, it was with much interest that we read a few months ago an article by Prof. Horace Packard (Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. cixv., No. 7. Pp. 247-250) on "Tree Cancer," followed recently by another, doubtless the outgrowth of reasoning and experimental research along this same line, on Demineralized Food and Cancer.

This theory, while it may be new to many and particularly to the members of the regular profession, before whom Professor Packard has most adroitly placed it, is a child of rather mature growth to the followers of Nature Cure, and not unknown to a large percentage of the homoeopathic profession. If the many professional brethren, whom it is to be hoped Dr. Packard may interest in this most important of all subjects, will read some of the modern works on Nature Cure published in this country or those of the German authors, not neglecting the teachings of the oftridiculed Father Kneip and his followers, they will find abundant corroboration of this theory. Toward the solution of this important problem, the so-called Natural Diet is without doubt a step in the right direction, and should be most carefully investigated by all who can bring themselves to cast aside professional or sectarian prejudice and test its claims. The Natural Diet consists in the use of natural fruits, nuts, a certain amount of fresh milk, a whole

meal bread of wheat or the black rye bread of the Germans, spoken of so frequently by the Nature curists, the advocates of the Water Cure, and also by Hahnemann, who, in addition to his "Homoeopathic Diet," so long popular among his followers, thus wrote upon this subject in connection with hydrotherapy: "In thus making the cold bath next to the proper diet the main factor in the strengthening treatment of old ulcers I have the most exquisite success and numerous cases to support me, and I demand the most complete faith in this matter.

"That even the poorest can make use of this glorious means of relief easily and without extensive prescriptions, except those already given above, is no small proof of the excellence of the method. . . . Even one-half of the remedies given to the most luxurious will do for him all that is needful, and black rye-bread will serve him instead of strengthing soups."

Those who are interested in this most important matter, by which "expedient alone," writes Dr. Packard, "the cancer rate may be reduced from its present appallingly high rate to twenty-five or less to the ten thousand," are earnestly urged to study with renewed interest along the lines suggested by these advocates of the Natural Diet.

In Vol. 2 of the Nature Cure Magazine, an excellent journal of Nature Cure may be found an interesting article on this very problem of Cancer and the Natural Diet, in which the editor makes an able plea for the substitution, for the poisonous and acidproducing meats and flesh foods, of the simple, non-irritating positive cell elements found in this simple diet, namely, the salts of sodium, potassium, magnesium, iron, flourine, silica, sulphur and phosphorus found in fruits, fresh vegetables and nuts; for the elimination of the system's waste products by hydrotherapy, proper osteopathic treatment, and best of all by the properly selected antipsoric remedy of homoeopathy. At the sanitarium of which this writer is the superintendent, those interested may find a possible solution of Dr. Packard's problem of "the extraction of food salts. from vegetable scurces and their preparation in a convenient form for administration to augment, where advisable, the supply in ordinary foods," in simple combinations of just such substances, prepared from fresh vegetables.

We would add, furthermore, as a possible helpful suggestion in the beginning of such investigation, in the coöperation of which Dr. Packard invites his professional associates, that in our search for the cause of cancer we shall never find it originating from without, but from within the organism, the outward expression, the cell proliferation being but the result of internal derangement, a malnutri ́ion due to lack of proper cellular elements in the case of the tree, and the inability ca the part of the vital force in man to appropriate to its ends proper nutrition. In many instances this may be because of a lack of these ingredients, in others there is an overabundance. It cannot, in our opinion, be sustained, as many have

sought to prove, that meat-eating alone is responsible for the increase of cancer, else all who eat meat or flesh foods would be thus afflicted, which, obviously, is not the case. That many who do eat meat develop serious acid conditions of which cancer may be a most frequent consequence, there can be little doubt, and this the author of the Nature Cure Magazine has well pointed out. Its origin must then be looked for in malnutrition due to some cause or causes to which we are all contributing more or less by the daily régime; in other words, cancer is an ultimate or end product of malnutrition and represents the sum of all dietetic and hygienic indiscretions, mental, moral and physical in the complex life of the individual. What is more likely than that in this complexity the question of a proper food-stuff forms ultimately no small part? Nor can we say that demineralized food is the sole cause, else we should all of us succumb to its influence, but it suffices that, as has been shown, cancer is absent among peoples who subsist upon a diet which is largely free from flesh foods and our modern bolted flour bread. According to this theory, which we trust will fast gain its adherents among the medical profession, the search for the bacteriological factor in cancer must of necessity prove futile or at all events of less and less absorbing interest, for having found the offending bacillus, spirillum or coccus, how shall we deal with it? Plainly a matter of the non-sowing of the seed, in other words, the making of the body an unsuitable habitat; then it must of necessity seek some more congenial host.

Hensel has shown that the condition known as helminthiasis is dependent upon the proper chemical soil; then worm propagation becomes, as it were, spontaneous; similarly there is first the suitable soil or the pre-cancer state or diathesis (the carcinosis of Dr. John H. Clark), then the cancer germ, which according to this same reasoning must be of endogenous rather than purely exogenous development.

The soil, hypothetically at all events, has been prepared for us to a greater or less extent by the generations who have preceded us upon this planet, through bad habits in eating, drinking, and thinking in other words, in the developing of the inborn seeds of disease. Why explain cancer in any more difficult terminology?

Hahnemann defined this condition a century ago when he wrote his masterly work on the chronic diseases. This disease tendency, this psora of Hahnemann, represents the potential seeds of the disease; cancer as a material evidence of organic disease is a part of this portentous harvest.

Let us work the problem in both directions; forwards from causes to results in our process of reasoning; backwards by the elimination of these results by alteration of the evils from which they have had their beginnings, thus bringing about the removal of disease symptoms in the reverse order of their appearance.

The Natural Diet stipulates, however, that in many instances it is mineralized instead of demineralized food that in numerous