immediately suspended, and if anesthesia is continued it should be with ether.

Dr. A. C. Davidson of Sharon: I live in a country district; I have administered anesthetics quite a number of times, or have had them administered. I use chloroform exclusively when I have the direction. The only death I have ever seen from anesthesia was from the A. C. E. mixture-alcohol, chloroform and ether. It was administered to an old negro upon whom I was to operate for elephantiasis. He lived long enough for the operation to be completed, which consumed two or three hours, and he did not respond to any form of stimulation.

Pinching the face, slapping him, burning him with chloroform had no effect, and he died under the influence of the A. C. E. mixture. I have used chloroform as an anesthetic in patients of all ages. The oldest one to whom I administered this anesthetic was a colored woman, 76 years of age, for the relief of an irreducible strangulated hernia. She stood it splendidly. I used it on a babe three days old year before last for a deformity in the rectum, and kept the infant under the influence of it an hour and a half without any difficulty or serious results accruing from it.

With reference to the muscular rigidity referred to by Dr. Little, I have seen chloroform relieve this rigidity of the muscles may times in the eclamptic seizures of puerperal women. It is the best agent I have ever used for that condition.

As a matter of course, my experience and my opinion would not weigh with those men who have administered it thousands of times, and yet by a close study of cases of which I have read, I agree fully with Dr. Elliott that chloroforin is the safer anesthetic.

With reference to the strong pulse to which Dr. Noble referred, I do not see how it would be an indication of approaching death.

Dr. Noble: I said a weak pulse.

Dr. Davidson: We know that the heart is largely controlled by the tenth pair of nerves and the stimulation of them slows the heart, and the paralysis of those nerves accelerates its action, and I cannot see how a slowing of the heart would be an index of approaching death.

ALBUMINURIA, INCLUDING ORIGINAL INVESTIGATIONS, AND ITS RELATION TO DISEASES OF THΕ ΕΥΕ.

BY ALEX. W. STIRLING, M.D., C.M. (EDIN.), D.P.H. (LOND.) ETC., ATLANTA, GA.

The various forms of albuminuria do not bear an equally close relationship to diseases of the eye, but in that connection they all have some interest. Eye diseases, on the other hand, sometimes throw much light on albuminuria, and enable us to elucidate the true import of symptoms which might otherwise pass as trifling. Albuminuria, it should be remembered, is of quite common occurrence in the general population. Before its precise frequency among young people was known, when a reaction was setting in some ten to fifteen years ago against the hitherto generally accepted idea that renal albuminuria always meant serious derangement of the kidney, some were inclined to go to the other extreme and look upon it as lacking in pathological significance in the majority of cases. At this period such names as "physiological albuminuria," the "albuminuria of adolescence," "cyclic albuminuria," were applied to the condition, but these carried no explanation with them. With the view of discovering the real frequency of albuminuria in apparently healthy people I instituted in 1887 a series of experiments upon the urines of 461 persons. The greatest care was taken to avoid error, and no urine was passed over till I was completely satisfied whether a precipitate were albumen or not. I have no intention of going fully into this matter, an epitome of which can be found in the London Lancet (December 10, 1887), along with complete figures in tabular form. But I wish to say a few words which are apropos of my present subject. In one class of 369 boys, in age varying from twelve to sixteen, both inclusive, there were seventy-seven albuminurics, or 20.8 per cent. I desired to find the cause of this. I eliminated George Johnson's cold bath theory. I proved that it was not produced by food. I found that the urine passed before rising in the morning contained no albumen, but that soon after rising albumen was present, disappearing gradually towards evening. It could be made to disappear at any time by merely causing the patient to lie down, and it would never occur at all throughout the day if he remained recumbent. It will be observed that these experiments were carried on upon the supposition that posture might have something to do with the presence of the albumen. And this was conclusively proved to be the case. Indeed posture had everything to do with it, for which reason I proposed the name "postural albuminuria." This name I find is now in common use by writers in English, German and French journals. There can be little doubt that, as I at first suggested, the albuminuria results from a temporary paresis of the renal vessels, but I by no means wish to be understood as meaning that this albuminuria is truly physiological. I have always held that, as there are of course degrees and kinds of renal lesions, this is merely that stage or form which is of least serious moment, though its ultimate development has not yet been laid bare. A considerable number of these urines were examined microscopically for tube casts, but, except once or twice when hyaline casts were doubtfully present, none were found. In the annual "Lettsomian" Lecture last month, in which he makes frequent use of my figures, Dr. Samuel West, the lecturer for the year, remarks that in these cases the albumen is generally serum albumen and not nucleo-albumen, which latter it is thought by some might come from the urinary passages and not from the kidney, though of this there is no proof whatever. When making my experiments I noticed that a much larger number of the boys who played wind instruments were albuminurics than of those who did not, everything else being the same. The figures were respectively 59.4 per cent. and 12.8 per cent. This I put down to backward pressure. Sir T. Granger Stewart, of Edinburgh University, has since confirmed this observation, though his percentage among band players was not so high as mine. I had a letter some time ago from Dr. Theodore Maxwell, of Woolwich, who is a Russian scholar, informing me that Dr. Weinbaum, of St. Petersburg, had recently examined schoolboys and had found an even larger percentage than I did, "and amongst bandmen in the army his percentage is very high." Dr. Maxwell made an abstract of Dr. Weinbaum's paper for the Lancet, but I have never seen it. My observations to which reference has so far been made were in connection with adolescents, but at the same time I also carefully examined ninety-two other persons at various ages up to ninety-four, and of both sexes. This did not show that adolescence is the period of life most prone to albuminuria; on the contrary it showed that it is more common in middle, and still more in advanced, age than it is in youth. Dr. West has illustrated, by means of a chart, my figures in this lecture alongside his own more recent ones (336 persons examined for him by Dr. Levison), and Mahomet's, which show the proportion of granular to healthy kidneys. Dr. West's and my own agree in gradually ascending till at the ages of seventy or eighty, when some 70 or 80 per cent. of those examined had albuminuria. It is important to observe that Mahomet's curve re