LIBRARIAN'S REPORT, 1904-1905. Mr. Chairman and Members of the Library Committee: This year a permanent assistant has been employed, whose services have been shared with the secretary. After this year the library will derive greater benefit from this arrangment, the work of the secretary having been unusually heavy as a result of reorganization. The Bureau of Exchange of the Association of Medical Librarians was transferred to Brooklyn on July 1, thus removing a great deal of extra work and giving us the use of our basement for storage purposes. Extra assistance has only been employed for six weeks, but there is need of six months' special work in the basement alone. It is impossible for anyone not in library work to realize the detail necessary to place a book on the shelf of a library and the numberless administrative details. We are very grateful to the library committee for their patience and help. The completion of the inventory of the books from the cards revealed a startling number of lost books-46. Added to this are four borrowed books which we have been unable to recover, also four books which have been lost this year. Each year we find many numbers of journals missing. Some of these are replaced with difficulty, but many not at all, making it impossible to bind the volume, and thus spoiling an otherwise complete set. There is almost no change in the use of the library this year and last. There were 5076 readers, and 1584 books loaned for home use this past year. The library now numbers 14,590 volumes, including 4764 bound journals; also 5719 unbound monographs and reprints. Of these, 767 volumes and 418 reprints were donated during the year. Books: Association of Medical Librarians, 7; Dr. I. E. Atkinson, 26; Book and Journal Club, 11; Boston Medical Library, 10; Enoch Pratt Free Library, 8; Dr. J. M. T. Finney, 2; Dr. J. D. Fiske, 2; Frick Library, 264 (28 being the gift of Dr. Osler); Dr. J. Friedenwald, 2; Dr. J. S. Fulton, 3; Dr. L. K. Hirshberg, 2; Dr. Howard Kelly, 1; Library Committee Fund, 6; Library Surgeon-General's Office, 1; Luzerne County Medical Library, 1; Dr. S. K. Merrick, 5; Dr. S. W. Mitchell, 1; Dr. R. Murdoch, 59; Dr. G. W. Norris, 3; Ophthalmological Section, 5; Dr. W. Osler, 40; Dr. S. Paton, 8; Dr. H. Richardson, r'; Rockefeller Institute, 1; Dr. J. Ruhräh, 1; Dr. C. E. Simon, 2; Dr. J. T. Smith, 2; Dr. W. S. Thayer, 53; Dr. J. W. Williams, 26; Dr. J. G. Wiltshire, I; by binding journals, 215. Reprints Association of Medical Librarians, 4; Dr. Buller, 1; Dr. E. F. Cordell, 4; Enoch Pratt Free Library, 50; Mr. C. P. Fisher, 1; Dr. Frazier, 17; Dr. H. Friedenwald, 3; Dr. G. L. Hunner, 13; Dr. Reid Hunt, 2; Dr. A. Jacobi, 1; Dr. G. G. Lewis, 2; Dr. Mears, 1; Dr. S. W. Mitchell, 36; Dr. R. Murdoch, 213; Dr. Musser, 9; Dr. G. W. Norris, 23; Dr. S. Paton, 6; Dr. J. Ruräh, 1; Dr. W. W. Steiner, 3; Dr. C. K. Mills, 4; Dr. W. A. B. Sellman, 1; Dr. S. Theobald, 2; Dr. F. Willard, 2; Dr. J. W. Williams, 4; Dr. R. Winslow, 15. Miscellaneous journals were presented by Drs. J. E. Clagett, W. S. Gardner, H. B. Jacobs, John G. Jay, R. Murdoch, W. B. Platt, W. W. Russell, G. Lane Taneyhill, W. S. Thayer. There were also many duplicates donated, which are used for exchange. Another appeal has been made for reprints of articles by members of the Faculty, and reports of hospitals and medical institutions in the city and State. Full files of these should be found on our shelves. Of the 347 volumes collated and bound, there were 100 selected from among the old books and rebound in buckram. Many more such valuable books require rebinding. There are 157 journal files to be found on the reading-room shelves. Of these, 52 were donated by the Book and Journal Club, 12 by Dr. Osler, I by Dr. Hemmeter, 8 through Association of Medical Librarians, 2 by University of Maryland, 55 by subscription of library committee, and 25 by exchange. Among the books purchased by the Frick Library Fund there are 148 valuable English transactions and journals selected by Dr. Osler in London. A notable contribution has been made to our museum by Dr. J. E. Clagett, who presented the glass mortar and pestle and several instruments which belonged to a founder of the Faculty, Dr. Zachariah Clagett. Dr. Clagett also presented pictures of the Clagett family. GENERAL FINANCIAL STATEMENT. Receipts. Library appropriation, 1904-1905.... Contributions from four medical schools.. Total receipts... Expenditures. Association Medical Librarians, dues..... Association Medical Librarians, librarian's expenses. Deutsch Company, supplies. A. Hoen & Co., supplies. Library Bureau, supplies. Nunn & Co., supplies.. Maryland Medical Journal. New York Medical Journal. .$1200 00 150 00 .$1350 00 $10 00 25.00 4 25 II 50 24 50 14 58 5 00 2.00 5 00 A HANDBOOK OF NURSING FOR HOSPITAL AND GENERAL USE. Published under the direction of the Connecticut Training School for Nurses connected with the General Hospital Society, New Haven, Conn. Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott Company. 1905. This is a revised and enlarged edition of the Connecticut Handbook of Nursing, first published in 1878. It includes 14 chapters on nursing proper and two chapters on family hygiene and emergencies. There are 25 illustrations, most of them from photographs. It is a very good little book for its purpose. THE INTERNAL-REVENUE TAX ON LIQUORS DISGUISED AS MEDICINES. MR. JOHN W. YERKES, internal-revenue commissioner, has recently decided that several so-called medicines are, in fact, no more than alcoholic beverages, and as such subject to the rectifier's tax. Druggists who sell these compounds are also liable to the retail liquor dealer's tax. The order goes into effect on December 1, 1905. The list of patent and proprietary medicines affected by this decision is now in course of preparation. The Revenue Department will not accept the sworn statements of manufacturers as to the composition of their nostrums, but samples purchased in the open market and analyzed by government chemists will determine the classification of these products. The list will undoubtedly be a rather long one, and will include some of the most profitable nostrums on the market. The order may not seriously impair the sales of these intoxicants, but it will relieve the drug trade of the opprobrium of complicity in the illicitliquor business. Among the small druggists in Baltimore this order has created some consternation. The tax of $25 a year imposed by the government is not a serious matter except in so far as it tends to classify the small druggist with the liquor dealers more closely than he likes. The large druggists carry the liquor license regularly without incurring this unpleasant distinction. The results to the community will, however, make the possible injury to small druggists seem quite unimportant. When people know that many of the widely-advertised medicines are only bad cocktails, druggists will be somewhat wary of promoting drunkenness by recommending these nostrums, but there will still remain the large army of consumers who desire to buy intoxicants under false names, and these will be no worse off nor any wiser if they know the truth about the seller as well as about the thing sold. Public convenience will suffer nothing in the suppression of a good many small drug stores. Not a few such shops hold out false pretenses in calling themselves drug stores, for they do not keep on hand the drugs or medical supplies which are likely to be called for. They keep toilet articles and the nostrums and pharmaceuticals useful in their own counter-prescribing, but many of them are not prepared to fill physicians' prescriptions. They, of course, accept such prescriptions, and very easily conceal their unpreparedness to fill them. It is only necessary to say that half an hour will be required to fill the prescription, and that the medicine will be sent to the house at the end of that time. The formula may call for 30 tablets of sodium salicylate, 5 grains each. The half-hour is utilized in sending a messenger or telephoning for 100 or 500 such tablets. Perhaps there are not many druggists who handle their prescription trade in this way, but it is quite evident that such a prescription business can be but an insignificant producer of revenue, and that public convenience would in no way suffer if all such dealers became wholly dependent upon the popular demand for nostrums and sophisticated liquors. It is a mistake to suppose that the fraudulently branded liquors are distributed chiefly by small dealers. Several large concerns dispose of enormous amounts, utilizing bargain-counter methods to attract purchasers. Cutrate pharmacies and department stores have long been as thorns in the flesh of patent-medicine moonshiners, though their peculiar methods have probably increased the total sales of such products. The new order will probably not greatly diminish the consumption of the taxed nostrums, but it will tear off the disguise and will somewhat diminish the profits to the manufacturers. THE QUARANTINE CONFERENCE. ON November 9 and 10 the governors of at least 12 Southern States, with men of high commercial standing in the South, will meet in Chattanooga to consider the subjects of quarantine and immigration. The perils of immigration have claimed a great deal of attention from Southern statesmen in recent years, and mature views on this subject will no doubt be brought to the conference from all quarters. The pains of quarantine are of very recent and very acute experience, and the opinions on this subject will probably be clear only as to the general character of quarantine, that it is a most distressing nuisance, to be mitigated if possible, but not to be altogether avoided. It is interesting to note how promptly the average Southerner, even when under the ban of quarantine, will speak up in its defense if one ventures the opinion that quarantine is an unnecessary nuisance. Four years ago the prophylaxis of yellow fever meant quarantine or nothing, and one cannot wonder that four years have not sufficed to establish the truth that yellow fever may be controlled by definite and orderly procedures without creating disturbance of any sort beyond the immediate vicinity of infection. As Dr. Kohuke says, "Vestiges of old beliefs have a tendency to cling to the brain independently of their value,” and time must always be allowed for new principles to become convertible to the uses of the people. It might, of course, be an extravagant kind of reform to cut quarantine procedures down at once to the precise measure of scientific necessity, without regard to the characteristics of the people who are to be defended, but the need of a man of science to be restrained by a knowledge of social and political conditions is no greater than the need of a man of affairs to keep in view the limits which science sets in such matters. The common belief is that quarantine is a public-health measure, established on the authority of preventive medicine, and practiced by all civilized nations in the prevention of cholera, smallpox, plague, and yellow fever. The fact is that the onerous features of even maritime quarantine |