July 27: Having been removed to St. Joseph's or the Sisters' Hospital at Denver, Dr. Lowery gave him chloroform, and I opened the joint in several places, and made counter-openings above the knee, from which escaped about half a pint of the most offensive smelling, dark-colored pus. The wound was thoroughly irrigated with a mercuric bichloride solution, and injected with an etherial solution of iodoform, and then a number of iodoform gauze drain setons, such as have been already described (in my paper) were introduced, and the wound was sealed with antiseptic precautions.

August 5: Knee dressed as on the 27th of July; doing splendidly and not a drop of pus; temperature normal.

cured.

Afterwards I gave long and careful attention to him, and finally he was

EXHIBIT TEN.

RAILWAY INJURIES. BAD COMPOUND FRACTURE JUST ABOVE THE KNEE-JOINT, WITH PROJECTION OF BONE OUTSIDE OF THE WOUND; AND CRUSHING INJURY OF THE OPPOSITE FOOT CLOSE UP TO THE ANKLE JOINT IN FRONT. CURED.

Extracts from my paper in the Transactions of the Colorado State Medical Society of 1889. This paper was also published in the "Medical News" of Philadelphia:

Case.-Charles F., aged 31; on July 10, 1888, sixty or eighty miles. from Denver, fell under the wheels of a freight train while in motion, and had his right foot crushed close up to the ankle joint, and his left femur broken in fragments just above the knee-joint. The rectus femoris muscle was ruptured, its ruptured ends crushed; the skin covering it was rudely torn and contused, and a fragment of bone projected outward through the external wound.

Both the wounds of the foot and opposite thigh were covered with dirt and clotted blood, and were exposed to the air during fifteen or eighteen hours previous to his arrival in Denver at the Arapahoe County Hospital. I saw him at the request of Dr. McLauthlin, the attending physician of the hospital, who with others assisted me in the amputation of the foot, and the dressing and splinting of the opposite fractured thigh.

Result of treatment for formidable railway injuries, which caused an open fracture of the thigh bone just above the left knee-joint; crushing of the muscles and outside projection of the bone; also crushing of the foot of the opposite side up to the ankle-joint, in front, that required the excellent Russian amputation, known as the Pirogoff operation.

After the amputation of the foot and application of its dressing, four or five pieces of bone were detached and removed from the broken thigh bone.

"For the first two or three days the temperature was 101° to 102° F. On the third day it was up to 103.5° F., and the removal of the dressings disclosed a superficial gangrene, not only of the amputation wound, but also of the wound at the seat of the fractured thigh bone.

The wounds were covered with pultaceous and gangrenous masses; but the general condition of the patient was encouraging, and he was not depressed.

Having cut away with curved scissors most of the gangrenous masses, the parts were mopped with a concentrated solution of carbolic acid, then washed thoroughly; balsam of Peru of good quality was poured liberally into the wounds, oakum applied and the dressing completed. Tincture of muriate of iron, fifteen drops at a dose, every three hours; whisky, broth and other liquid nourishment were freely given.

The accompanying half-tone engraving from a photograph taken June 4, 1889, shows his condition at that time, about eleven months subsequent to the injuries.

MEMORANDUM NOTE.-April 11, 1900. He accosted me to-day on Fifteenth street in Denver, nearly twelve years since his mishap. He walks swiftly and remarkably well; wears an artificial foot concealed within his shoe and attached to the stump of his heel and leg. One would not know, to see him walk, that he ever had anything the matter with his lower limbs. Some small pieces of dead bone have occasionally escaped from the places at which was located the compound fracture of the thigh bone of his left side. In his Gascon manner, though he is a Kelt, he boasts he can walk fifty miles in a day. His occupation is clipping horses; he is strong, active, healthy --happy, and many a person might envy him his cheerfulness.

UNCERTAIN THERAPEUTICS.

BY J. M. BLAINE, M. D., DENVER, COLO.

How often have we heard the leading men in our profession boast of the rapid progress that has been made in Medical and Surgical science during recent years. No retiring president of a medical society has considered his essay complete, unless he has made reference to the giant strides that have been made in recent years.

We are disposed to boast that the closing years of the Nineteenth century were record-breakers, when compared with the centuries that preceded them.

I do not doubt that the last twenty-five years of the past century saw more advances in surgery and some lines of medicine than the other eighteen hundred and seventy-five years since the Christian era, all combined.

While this is true of surgery and certain lines of medicine, there are other lines in which we have not only not progressed, but have actually retrogressed. I refer to Therapeutics, and in the few minutes allowed for the reading of this paper I will attempt to call your attention to a few of the more common retrograde movements that have been forced on my notice during the past years in which other lines were progressing.

Our pharmaceutical houses deserve great credit for the manner in which they have furnished us with pure preparations from standard drugs, and in some instances with more palatable combinations, but the physician who depends on a pharmaceutical house to furnish him with his Materia Medica will sooner or later find that he has been chasing the will-o'-the-wisp and experimenting at the expense of his patient, for the profit of the aforesaid manufacturer.