A GREAT SURGEON.

The late President McKinley's surgeon, Dr. Roswell Park of Buffalo, N. Y., died suddenly of heart disease, February 15th, at his home.

Dr. Park was born in Pomfret, Conn., in 1852. He was educated at Racine College, founded by his father, where he was graduated in 1872. He studied medicine at Northwestern University and University and after graduation spent several years as demonstrator in anatomy and lecturer on surgery at the Women's Medical College, the Chicago Medical College and Rush Medical College of Chicago. In 1883 the medical department of the University of Buffalo called him to a professorship of surgery, which chair he held thirty-one years.

Dr. Park's opinions on malignant growths and tumors attracted world-wide attention. He was a prolific writer and his works on surgical and other scientific subjects covered a wide range. Honorary degrees were conferred upon him by Yale, Harvard and Lake Forest universities.

His death vacates a place high in the ranks of the world's surgery. · S. G. B.

KANSAS NORTHEAST MEDICAL SOCIETY. SOCIETY.

This society held its annual meeting in Kansas City, Kansas, February 19th. Some twentyfive Kansas physicians were present. The afternoon session gave a symposium on Ulcers of the Stomach: Dr. E. T. Shelley, of Atchison, discussed the Cauastion and Diagnosis; Dr. M. Shoyer, of Wheaton. presented the Medical Treatment; Dr. Geo. M. Gray. Kansas City, gave the Surgical Treatment.

Dr. R. M. Matz, of Leavenworth, read "Protein Diet in Nephritis." Mr. W. Y. V. Deacon, of the Kansas Bureau of Vital Statistics discussed, "Vital Statistics and the Public." Dr. C. C. Nesselrode and Dr. J. S. Milne, of Kansas City, presented the "Surgical Treatment of Bone Tuberculosis" and "Vaccine Therapy of Typhoid Fever. A 6 o'clock dinner was given at the Grund Hotel.

Dr. E. T. Shelley, Atchison, was elected preisdent; Dr. John Algire, Topeka, vicepresident, and Dr. J. L. Everhardy, Leavenworth, secretary. The next meeting will be held in Atchison, Kansas.

The State Board of Medical Examiners of Oklahoma is authorized by the attorney general's office to revoke license to practice without going into court.

Plaintiff Attorney.-Your Honor, there is a sponge in the petition! We claim a sponge in plaintiff's abdomen. This surgeon is a trickster; he knows his presence at the operation and his financial standing makes him liable for damages. Plaintiff objects to the motion.

His Honor.-Motion overruled.

Defendant Attorney.-Defendant excepts to the court's ruling; I offer the constitution, page 1313, showing no authority for such ruling.

His Honor.-The constitution has no standing in this court! Mr. Marshall remove the book from the room before it injects error into the records. Proceed!

The verdict a week later.-The jury finds for the plaintiff; plaintiff shall return the sponge to the defendant and defendant shall pay said plaintiff the sum of $10,000 with interest at 6 per cent for storage charges overdue.

JUDGE-MADE LAW.

Government, by Judges!-the exclamation mark being the nearest to a big stick insignia befitting the introductory. That their own power might retroactively be their own Waterloo, Chief Justice Walter Clark (1) of the North Carolina Supreme Court, warned his fellows that the power of all federal and state government was within the dictation of a "judicial oligarchy," an ensemble of United State lawyers.

And whence came the power? Without an authoritative word, a line or sentence in the constitution to warrant the usurpation, the United States Supreme Court rendered a judicial decision in 1803 relegating unto the judiciary the assumed power to veto any and every act of Congress which the members of the presiding iudicial body might interpret as unconstitutional. Thus germinated the spirit of the government of the many by a few. By habit infection this dominant power became residual in every court in every state; and any subsequent law enacted not meeting the views of the

(1) New York Address, January 27, 1914.

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judiciary readily shared the fate of a judicial decision, declaring it unconstitutional, being defined as not "due process of law."

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By way of warning to his fellow judges to not be unduly extravagant in the application of their preponderating authority, Mr. Justice Harland is quoted as advising that there would be trouble when the American people determined that the judiciary had assumed within its own functions of the department of government legislation. "Ninety millions of people all sorts of people-are not going to submit to the usurpation by the judiciary of the functions of other departments of the government, and the power on its part to declare what is the public policy of the United States."

But is the legal dispensation of the great compilation of established judicial decisions from on high a source of peacemaking and justice dealing in its every day application to the plain people? If so why does the Journal of Criminal, Law and Criminology say: "Our method of requiring or permitting litigants to hire legal prize fighters to try cases has inevitably made it impossible for either bench or bar to do much, if any, better than they have done. Codes of ethics and tinkering with details of practice will not rescue the realm of jurisprudence from the prostitution into which it has been plunged. And again, Mr. R. S. Gray, the legal writer, points to the signs of the times as indicating professional degeneracy in this: There is a contempt of law (because it does not secure justice) spreading abroad and deepening in the land; and it threatens the overthrow of free institutions.

If there is anything free in the institution of law, few are they who have felt it other than its sting. In criminal transgression probably it is best that the sting be felt, yet its possible that many of the victims if freed from a revengeful and ambitious prosecution would better receive hospital care, removed from the lingering taints of barbaric inflictions of less enlightened days, to correction meted out in the kindly and intellectual fluorescence of a scientific and christian enlightenment.

In its intent the law is supposed to be the champion of peace and justice to the lay citizenship; but it has at this time so far departed from this humane standard as to be the medium through which its "legal prize fighters," its legal acrobats, its legal contortionists, legal jugglers and legerdemain artists all operate in the name of the law, within the judicial decision protect

orate, in most scandalous pillage of bread earned by the sweat of the face," and in the tarnishing, smashing and tearing asunder of the most tender ties of the best citizenship of a human life time. Torn and rended unto irretrievable restitutionand for what? For the little hard earnings of a fellow's labor or that some one may be destroyed that he may no longer stand in some one's way!

And who can ever picture the anguish of mind that turns the ruddy countenance pale and clammy, the breath fetid, nights sleepless and days foodless and sunless? Yet this is what happens to the innocent man today when sacrificed in the very jaws of an every-day court of justice; and as these judicial wheels are grinding his life out he sees the legal guns trained on him, loaded with judicial decisions," from which he has no recourse. No more revolt

ing example has come to view than that which wiped out the life's savings of his sightless eyes in the legally permitted attempt to destroy the great blind man from Oklahoma with his faultless record in a position only second to that of the President of the United States.

We wonder who may have computed the mental and physical ills, actual ill health sufferings, growing out of the thousands of irresponsible, useless and baseless law suits, daily grinding out an ill-gotten sustenance for men whose mothers once shuddered to know their son's chose a calling in which, it is generally remarked, no truly honest believer of the golden rule can succeed. Suits primarily for revenge and pillage, suits intended to blast business. and personal reputation can only bring untold suffering because of the mental anguish to a refined mentality. Such is only "black handing" and highway slugging in the night time in the end results under the permission and protection of judicial decisions. In highway robbery and in the black hand threats, the victim may have a fighting chance but not so in suits that should never be known in a court of justice.

By this class of suits no calling is probably so jeopardized as is the profession of medicine. Malpractice suits are coming so thick and fast that a doctor without a past or pending suit, like the abdomen of today without a surgical scar, is becoming a curiosity. While writing this, we read of a Kansas City surgeon drawing a row of red head line letters, telling the public he is being sued for $25,000 for malpractice. If he wins his suit he is loser in money and professional prestige because of the yellow

press publicity. If he loses the suit his prestige and finances suffer accordingly (2).

RIGHTS OF MEDICAL WITNESSES.

The latest judicial decision in Missouri is the holding of physicians in contempt for failure to respond immediately to a subpoena as witnesses for the plaintiff in a suit for damages. With the majority of the nine divisions of the Jackson Co. Circuit

Court engaged much of the time in trying damage suits it seems the legal status of the courts' authority to demand the forthwith attendance of physicians as witnesses has not been heretofore definitely determined. It is reasonable that witnesses should promptly give their services to a court of justice, but is it a just authority to demand that an ambulance surgeon shall go forthwith to testify in a damage suit, leaving his important duties unattended, possibly at the expense of life because of his absence from duty? The presiding judge seemed to rule that the court should exercise such authority and the presumption is that such a ruling is in accord with the required knowledge of the technicalities of the law as applied to such emergencies.

Error, if there be any error, would seem to be in the attorney's failure to list their witnesses that convenient notice could be given and the ambulance surgeon permitted time to arrange his absence without jeopardizing life or falsifying his high official duty by leaving it unattended.

It is well that physicians and surgeons do not overrate themselves as privileged under the law. They are entitled to $1.50 per day for court service as we determined in our two trips to the Court of Appeals in the case of Burnett versus Freeman. Neither is it wise to assume a privileged relation in attending or not attending court as witnesses when once sum moned as failure to do so is an imposition on the court, not the attorney who is reasonably familiar with court rulings and knows his rights. Its well that the physician assume no rights not accorded plain humanity in a court of justice. A banana is accused of being dangerous whether in the stomach or on the sidewalk. If a physician nowadays must get mixed up in the support of lawyers he should revere them with a bananaized longing, silently them with a bananaized longing, silently

take his medicine and not attempt to make or unmake judicial decisions. S. G. B.

(2) Many suits against physicians show a doctor in the background directly or indirectly spitefully giving aid, venting his revenge on a competitor. The Board of Censors might bear this in mind.

New Catalogue.

W. B. Saunders Company, publishers of Philadelphia and London, have just issued an entirely new eighty-eight page illustrated catalogue of their publications. As great care has evidently been taken in its production as in the manufacture of their books. It is an extremely handsome catalogue. It is a descriptive catalogue in the truest sense, telling you just what you will find in their books and showing you by specimen cuts, the type of illustrations used. It is really an index to modern medical literature describing some 250 books, including 30 new books and new editions. A postal sent to W. B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia, will bring you a copy-and you should have one.

The A. M. A. at Atlantic City.

Arrangements are in progress for a special train to Atlantic City in June, under the auspices of the Medical Society of the Missouri Valley. The plans include a stopover of a day at White Sulphur Springs in West Virinia where a large sanitarium and baths have just been erected, under the direction of Dr. Geo. H. Kahlo. Full particulars will be published in our next issue.

State Medical Association, will be held in The annual meeting of the Missouri Joplin, May 13, 14, under the presidency of Dr. E. H. Miller, Liberty.

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The first installment of the new serial, "Joseph Smith, Mormon Prophet; Psychopathic Study," by Dr. B. F. Gillmor, will appear in the next issue of the Medical Herald.

Full Time Professors.-The General Education Board has, by its gift of $1,500,000 School, enabled that institution to work a to the Johns Hopkins University Medical now long cherished reform in the organizabranches in this institution. The fund is tion and teaching of the main clinical to be named the William H. Welch Endowment for Clinical Education and Research in honor of its professor of pathology; and the trustees of that University are unrestricted in the application of the income. Hopkins will now be able to reorganize its departments of medicine, surgery and pediatrics so that the professors and their chief assistants will receive adequate salaries and will be relieved of the necessity of practicing privately; They will give their whole time to education and research.

AUTO-INTOXICATION AND DIS-INTOXICATION IN RELATION TO THE ETIOLOGY AND TREATMENT OF DISEASE.*

(Continued from page 63.)

Flexner has emphasized that all germ producing changes are chemical (they are biochemical), and we are acting in as perfect harmony with the present progress of medicine to correct the cause of the degenerative diseases, which give the mortality roll of 750,000 annually in the United States, as we are when endeavoring to make a direct attack upon the etiology of infectious diseases.

But just as in the case of the infectious diseases, we are going to the cause back of the bacterial origin of such diseases, so must we look for the cause which is responsible for the incipient gastro-intestinal disorders which leads up to the development of intestinal stasis, and other gross manifestations of food poisoning.

in the case reported in a previous part of this paper, I found that fear was at the bottom of this young man's entire disease syndrome, and while correcting the physical effects resulting therefrom, by disintoxication through fasting, I proceeded to disintoxicate him psychically by giving him a sound philosophy of life, free from cant, dogma and narrowness, in accordance with the modern evolutionary theories that are exercising such a tremendous influence upon the practice of medicine at the present time. In other words, I equipped him with such knowledge of the facts of life as to free him from the fetters cast upon him by unfortunate heredity and environment, in so far as such was possible.

We can't dodge behind heredity and environment" and pretend to be in the lifesaving business.

It is my humble opinion that fear is responsible for more deaths in the world today than any other single factor, and that the emotional factor figures as a contributory cause in all diseases, acute or chronic, as well as in the development of gross pathology.

In the list of 62 cases with various nervous and mental manifestations of disease associated with intestinal stasis, so-called, treated by the method of fasting and reeducation herein outlined, I have yet to see evidence of the first ill-effect, with the result that there were no mortalities, and a marked improvement in the mental and

physical condition of every patient to the extent that they were enabled to resume the normal duties and responsibilities of life, save two that were complicated with incorrigible social misadaptations.

In all of this list, I found emotional manifestations which were exhausting the brain cell potentialities, and interfering with its function as the central battery which stores the energy that presides over the entire physiological machinery. Among them were those with cardio-vascular manifestations of disease, high blood pressure, or low blood pressure associated with cardiasthenia, as the result of abnormal emotions; degenerative changes in the kidneys, liver, blood, spleen, ductless glands, respiratory organs, brain and nervous system.

All emotions are activated by one or the other of the two fundamental instincts. i.e., and self and the species preservative instinct. The result of re-educating these individuals so as to equip them to express such emotional impulses by work and wholesome endeavor, or to guide such instincts by reason not held in abeyance fear, dealing with the facts as they are in this world as demonstrated and taught by the doctrine of evolution has resulted in the cure of epilepsy, the depressive psychoses, as well as the psycho-neuroses and other mental and physical conditions, to which we have given a thousand names, which are not diseases, but are the logical outcome of environmental influences of an educational and religious character which are exercising a life stifling and degenerating influence upon our present civilization.

The conduct of each and every individual, in whatever department of life, is the logical outcome of the aspirations of the primitive or purely animal instincts. It is likely that these are one and the same thing, for, in the last analysis, all life centers down to and resolves itself into the problems of self-preservation and preservation by propagation of the species; for the desire to preserve the species by the begetting of spring, is but a desire from another point of view, to extend our life beyond our present existence-project our influence into future generations-in keeping with the law of evolution in general. importance of this line of thought to the successful practice of medicine cannot be exaggerated.

The

It is not my purpose to go further here into a description of the technic of the