a few days their gums began to heal, the blood became healthy, natural color came in their faces, and strength came to the limbs. so lately racked with pain. This is, perhaps, an extreme illustration, but I am satisfied that in a lesser degree the want of fruit is responsible for much of the illness in the world. When a student I remember sitting beside a leading London surgeon as an unhealthy child was brought in suffering from a scrofulous-looking rash over the face. Turning to us he exclaimed, "That is a rash from eating lollies." And many times since have I had occasion to remember his teaching, as I have seen it verified. Good fruit clears the blood and prevents this sort of thing. This lemon juice cure for rheumatism is founded on scientific facts, and having suffered myself from acute gout for the last fifteen years, I have proved over and over again the advantages which are obtained from eating fruit. Garrod, the great London authority on gout, advises his patients to take oranges, lemons, strawberries, grapes, apples, pears, etc. Tardieu, the great French authority, maintains that the salts of potash found so plentifully in fruits are the chief agents in purifying the blood from these rheumatic and gouty poisons.

Perhaps in our unnatural, civilized society, sluggish action of the bowels and liver is responsible for more actual misery than any other ailment. Headache, indigestion, constipation, hemorrhoids, and a generally miserable condition, are but too often the experience of the sufferer, and to overcome it about half the drugs in the world are given in all sorts of compounds. Let the man of drugs go aboard that ship in mid ocean, with its crew suffering from all these ailments; let the man with his artificially made fruit salts have his trial at their bowels and liver; let the man of mercury and podophyllum, and all the so-called liver doctors try their best; call in the tribes of tonics, and give iron, quinine, arsenic, strychnia, and all the rest of the family; then try your stomachics for his digestion, but in spite of all these the scurvy fiend will sit aloft and laugh you to scorn. In fact, all these drugs

have been tried over and over again, and Dr. Buzzard, perhaps the greatest authority in the world, tells us they have all proved miserable failures. But bring in your fruit and the whole scene changes. Can not we show the world that what is applicable to these men in their extreme condition is more or less applicable to the millions of sufferers on land who now persist in looking upon fruit as a thing they can very well do without? Dr. Buzzard advises the scorbutic to take fruit morning, noon, and night. "Fresh lemon juice in the form of lemonade is to be his ordinary drink; the existence of diarrhea should be no reason for withholding it. Give oranges, lemons, apples, potatoes, cabbage, salads," and if this advice is good for those aboard, and there is no doubt about that, it is equally good for the millions who are spending millions annually in drugs which will never cure them. The first symptoms of scurvy are a change in the color of the skin, which becomes sallow or of a greenish tint. Then follows an aversion for all exercise. Bloodshot eyes, weak heart, bad digestion, and constipation follow on. Dr. Ballard says many of the most serious and fatal cases of scurvy he has seen have only presented as symptoms the pallid face, general listlessness, and bloodshot eyes. If we go through the back streets of our large towns how many pallid faced, listless-looking people and children swarm around us, and they have, as a rule, plenty of food! Within the last few weeks two of my own children have given me a good example of what fruit will do. Two months ago I decided to let these two boys, aged six and eight, go to my farm among the apple-packers. They were not actually ill when they went out, neither had they been at all shut up, but they were pale-looking, would not eat their food, etc. During the last two months they make their boast they eat a dozen apples a day each, and as soon as they began eating these apples their appetite for other foods about doubled, and during the eight weeks they have grown stout and robust, skin clear and healthy, with the glow of health on their

cheeks, and bodily strength equal to any amount of exertion.

As a medicine, I look upon fruit as a most valuable ally. As previously shown, when the body is in that breaking-up condition. known as scurvy, the whole medical profession look upon fruit and fresh vegetables as the one and only known remedy. I believe the day will come when science will use it very much more largely than it does now in the treatment of many of the everyday ailments. I have shown how it aids digestion. Observations in scurvy prove that it exerts a very powerful influence on the blood. But "the blood is the life": poor blood means poor spirits, poor strength, poor breath, and poor circulation. Impure blood means gout, rheumatism, skin diseases, rickets, and other troubles. As it is proved that fruit will purify and improve the quality of the blood, it must follow that fruit is both food and medicine combined. In fevers I use grapes and strawberries, giving them to my patients in small but frequent doses-oranges and baked apples, if the others are not obtainable. For rheumatism, plenty of lemons. are invaluable. White girls with miserable, pallid complexions want a quart of strawberries a day; where these are not obtainable, bananas, which contain much iron, are a good substitute. Probably, of all fruits, the apple stands unrivaled for general purposes in the household; either raw or cooked it can be taken by nearly everybody, and it contains similar properties to the other more delicate fruits. To my mind the pear is more easily digested than the apple, and for eating uncooked is superior to it. In our climate we can have good dessert pears nine months in the year, and their culture should be much increased.

Dried fruits are now occupying more attention than perhaps they have ever done before. It has been proved in a large way by giving troops dried vegetables and fruits that the attack of scurvy could be warded off, but in curing scurvy they were nowhere alongside green. Still it teaches us that dried fruits should be used when green can

not be obtained. If soaked for a few hours before cooking they make a capital substitute for fresh fruit, and they come cheaper to the consumer. I wonder that miners, sailors, and others do not use dried fruits very largely.

For preserving fruit I look upon bottling in glass bottles as the coming thing. Not by the use of chemicals, such as salicylic and boracic acids, and the various preservatives made from them, but simply by protecting it after cooking from the fermentive germs in the atmosphere. It keeps for years, turns out even more palatable than green fruit, is equally digestible, and contains all the virtues of freshly cooked fruit. When bottles are made in Australia at a cheap rate this will be a great industry. Canned fruit is not so good; the acid of the fruit dissolves up tin and lead from the tin, and I have seen very serious cases of illness as a result. Besides, fruit should be sold much cheaper in bottles than in tins, as the bottle can be returned and used again.

Jams made from nice fresh fruit, and put up in glass or ware, make a very good article of diet, but much of the jams of commerce should be used as food for pigs. Jams act on tin and lead very much like tart fruits, but the acid in them is greatly neutralized by the sugar. Still, I have seen the outside of the jam in a tin quite discolored.

Solomon said, "Stay me with raisins, comfort me with apples," so great and wise kings six thousand years ago wished to be fed with dried fruit and apples. In this highly enlightened age it is nothing to our credit that we pay less attention to our diet than these old patriarchs did. They thought more of their vineyards than they did of their cattle. When Moses sent the spies into Canaan they were told to bring back samples of the fruit it bore, and they brought back not a fat bullock but a very fat bunch of grapes. A medical writer has recently been maintaining that bread and other starchy food, containing as they do large quantities of lime, are responsible, especially in aged people, for many of the diseases from which we suffer, such as apoplexy,

rheumatic gout, etc., and urged that fruit should be taken freely instead, to counteract these limy effects. One of the first symptoms, when people are deprived of fruit and vegetables, is very severe pain in the joints like rheumatism, and death from failure of the heart's action. Whether he is right about this lime may not be proved, but there is no doubt but lime exists too largely in the blood vessels in these diseases, and if fruit were eaten regularly it would do much to prevent it. Science to-day tells us that we may live under the most beautiful conditions, we may feast on bread, meat, eggs, rice, cocoa, oatmeal, and such like foods for a short time, but unless we take fruits or fresh vegetables-fruits being the best-we shall get listless, with leaden face, etc., until we die in a few months at the longest; and it follows that if we would keep ourselves and our children with clear skins, bright intellects, good digestion, rich colored, healthy blood and strength for work, we must regularly take fruit and vegetables, and look upon them as actually more necessary for the support of good health than any other article of diet.

her breathing power by means of the corset. The great contrast between the metabolic activity of the two sexes was forcibly brought home to me by a military display given by a troupe of dusky amazons, with whom were also a few male warriors. The women, in spite of their daily exertions, were all rounded and plump, some very much so, no single muscle showing through the skin, and it was noticed that their movements, though full of grace, lacked energy and "go." The men, on the other hand, were spare, their muscles standing out plainly under the shiny skin, and they, in further contrast with the women, displayed a truly amazing agility, bounding about and whirling round in a most astounding fashion; the women, in short, were essentially anabolic and the men were katabolic. I may here draw attention to the fact that men are apt to be larger meat eaters than women, just as they are possibly in consequence of this very fact more prone to drink alcohol and to smoke tobacco.-The Lancet.

SEX AND FOOD.

THE male human needs more food than the female, not only on account of his larger stature, but also because he is the more katabolic of the two. The man tends to expend energy and the woman to store it up in the form of fat; he burns the faster. This sexual difference shows itself in the very blood; the man has a larger percentage of chromocytes than the woman, showing that he needs a proportionately larger quantity of oxygen in order to maintain this more active combustion-a fact which one may associate with his comparative freedom from chlorosis; moreover, weight for weight, his pulmonary capacity is greater than that of the woman whose smaller respiratory need is further shown by the facility with which she can without discomfort diminish

BACTERIA IN DIGESTION.

THE results of experiments with chickens to determine the effect of intestinal bacteria upon the process of digestion are reported by Professor Schottelius in a recent number of the Archiv für Hygiene (Lit. Dig.). Chickens were kept in cages from which all bacteria were carefully excluded and were supplied with food equally free from bacteria. They ate ravenously and almost continually and evidently digested their food well, yet not only did they not fatten but they steadily decreased in weight and strength. Another series of experiments gave direct and positive proof that the presence of intestinal bacteria is necessary to nutrition. Chickens which had been hatched and raised in a sterilized environment, receiving only germ-free food, thrived for a week, and then began to decline in weight and strength. Then they were divided into two groups, one of which was fed on steril

ized food, the other on food containing bacteria. All of the first group died in a few days, the others improved rapidly and soon were indistinguishable from chickens that had run free in the poultry-yard. Mme. Metchnikoff has obtained analogous results with tadpoles which, fed for a time with germ-free food, attained an average weight of 25 milligrams (0.4 grain) and an average length of 15.5 millimeters (0.62 inch), while other tadpoles, fed for the same period on ordinary food, had an average weight of 142 millimeters (2.2 grains) and an average length 26.5 millimeters (1.06 inches).

The author says on page 49 of his book: "The main reason for the failure of these lamps is that they produce far too little formaldehyd. According to Strüver and Brochet, only 5 to 10 per cent. of wood alcohol employed are changed to formaldehyd by the combustion, 90 to 95 per cent. of it being wasted as carbonic acid and water.

"Another disadvantage of these lamps is the production of carbonic oxid gas, which is created by every incomplete combustion. The quantity of the same is, according to Brochet, 3 to 5 per cent. of the alcohol employed. Such a large quantity of CO gas in the air can produce disagreeable results.'

FORMALDEHYD-A CORRECTION.

THE

concluding installment of Dr. Davis' paper on formaldehyd which appeared in our last issue had been suppressed from the August issue because of its misrepresentation of the "Schering" process of evolving this powerful antiseptic. So many medical writers seem to dash away with their pens without being sure of their premises. This was evidently the case with

Dr. Davis, who condemned the "Schering" process because, as he alleges, it produces the gas in a dry state, in which it is very much less efficient as a disinfectant and germicide.

The truth is the "Schering" process is specially based on the idea of delivering the gas charged with aqueous vapor.

There is no question but that the "Schering" process is the most efficient and reliable one now before the public. Other processes merit the criticisms contained in Dr. Davis' paper.

In a brochure, "The Formaldehyd" by Dr. Otto Hess, Chief Physician of the Medical Clinic of Marburg University, the author refers to the many formaldehyd generators depending upon the incomplete composition of wood alcohol for the production of formaldehyd gas and which have proved entirely insufficient.

GIVE HIM AIR; HE'LL STRAIGHT BE WELL."

IN view of the award to Dr. Arthur Latham of the first prize of £500 for his essay in regard to the proposed King's Sanatorium for Tuberculosis, some interest attaches to an address delivered a few months ago before the Hunterian Society of St. George's Hospital, by the successful competitor, on the Modern Treatment of Pulmonary Consumption. In it Dr. Latham throws well-deserved scorn upon the treatment which has been so often meted out to unfortunate sufferers from this disease, a treatment by-the-bye which can, even at the present day, be found in full swing in the out-patient departments of many a hospital, even of special consumption hospitals, where, if anywhere, one would expect to meet with better things. "It is not an uncommon experience," he says, "to find some unfortunate workman, who lives continuously in a fetid atmosphere and eats an indifferent amount of coarse and unnutritious food, taking all of the following medicines during the 24 hours: A mixture of codliver oil with malt, to supply, so it is said, the place of the fast-ebbing vital oil;' a mixture of gentian and sodium bicarbonate, to assist the jaded appetite! an ether mix

ture to strengthen the action of the heart when the patient feels more than usually ill; some form of lozenge to allay the cough during the day time, together with a newfangled antiseptic as an inhalation; and some pernicious preparation of opium to bring sleep at night." It is one of our amiable weaknesses to hold patent medicines in ridicule and contempt, but what could be more ridiculous, considering the teachings of the dead-house, than the current treatment of consumption so aptly described by Dr. Latham-a mere pouring in of drugs without any attempt to touch the root of the disease. Yet in the midst of all this drugging, which has been going on far longer than we can remember, there have been men who saw the truth. So far back as 1840, George Bodington insisted on the importance of a generous diet and a constant supply of pure air, and propounded the terrible heresy that "cold is never too intense for a consumptive patient." In 1855 Dr. Henry MacCormac, the father of the late Sir William MacCormac, published a book on somewhat similar lines, and in 1861 read a paper before the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in which he advocated what are now established principles. Yet what was the treatment which these pioneers received at the hands of their professional colleagues? Bodington's book, says Latham, "met with much bitter and fierce opposition, and eventually the disapproval of his methods became so universal that patients were driven from his sanatorium," while "the members of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society refused to pass the usual vote of thanks to Dr. MacCormac, because they thought that the paper was written by a monomaniac."

The position taken up by the medical profession in regard to the treatment of consumption has indeed been most deplorable, and has thrown into strong light the bar sinister which hangs over the origin of medicine-a science, if it be a science, springing in the far past from mystery and witchcraft, tainted with the methods of the sorcerer, and even now dominated by that overmas

tering faith in drugs and nostrums which is the direct and disastrous heritage handed down to us by our immediate ancestors, the apothecaries. It has been an ignoble spectacle. No one taking a broad view. Each man limited by his education and trudging along in the rut of his old habits-physicians pouring in drugs, surgeons scraping out bits of diseased tissue, while even now, in the full light of bacteriological science, we find men attempting to cure consumption by soaking the patient's tissues with antiseptics; and all this in defiance of the teachings of pathology, which go to show how frequently the disease gets well if the patient's vitality, the vis medicatrix naturæ, is but given a fair chance. Yet, how near we were to the truth if we would but have listened, if we would but have cut ourselves adrift from the prejudices ingrained in us by our education, and, in the words of one great man, have thrown "physic to the dogs," and in those of another, have investigated all things by "observation and experiment." Once a year we have met together to do honor to the immortal Harvey, and then we have returned to this miserable drug-giving as if Harvey had never existed. Meanwhile, notwithstanding our ostracism of new ideas, the teaching of Bodington, of MacCormac, and of the modern host of sanatorium owners has prevailed; and now, at last, in the full sunshine of royal patronage, we admit how simple is the truth, expressed as it is by the motto of Dr. Latham's essay: "Give him air; he'll straight be well." What sycophants we all are! It is high time that, as a profession, we sang a litany, "From the thraldom of dogma and the limitations of the physic bottle, Good Lord, deliver us."-The Hospital.

A SUMMER HINT.

"IN dry, dusty weather, sheets kept wet with Platt's Chlorides, tacked across open windows, will keep out particles of dust and moisten the air entering the sick-room."