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Too Much of a Good Thing.

No agent so beneficent, that too big a dose of it may not prove injurious. Sunbaths are a good thing, we have taken a good many of them ourselves and used in moderation and under proper directions they may prove very beneficial in a variety of conditions. But that even sunbaths may do damage has recently been shown by Grawitz, who reported, as a result of exposure to the sun in the various sun parlors, various forms of dermatitis, irregularity and rapidity of the pulse, high tension, accentuated second sound, elevation of temperature, headache, general malaise, and in a few cases, collapse from cardiac insufficiency.

There is nothing so good, that you cannot have too much of it.

The Spirochaeta in Danger?

Slight rumblings are beginning to be heard expressing doubts as to the spirochaeta pallida being the real cause of syphilis. The most important contribution in this direction is the paper presented to the International Medical Congress at Budapest by Dr. Schereschewsky (who is a careful investigator in spite of his non-euphonious name). In his paper he reports the results of his investigations at Neisser's Clinic in Breslau. He has succeeded in cultivating the spirochaetae, but strange to say, he has not been able to infect animals with these cultures.

A Resolution for the New Year.

If I were to suggest one resolution for the New Year it would be this:

Take all the past regrets which hang around your neck and drag you down to the ground, make a bundle of them and throw them overboard.

Many a person is paralyzed and incapacitated for work by the spectre of past regrets. Drive it away. You can do it if you want to. Begin anew. Everyday in the year can be made the beginning of a New Year.

Within limits we can be what we want to be, and feel the way we want to feel.

THERAPEUTIC MEDICINE, FOUNDED AND EDITED BY DR. WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, AND DEVOTED EXCLUSIVELY TO THE TREATMENT OF DISEASE, WILL SHOW GREAT INTRINSIC IMPROVEMENTS IN 1910. ONE-FIFTY PER ANNUM. TO CRITIC AND GUIDE SUBSCRIBERS ONE DOLLAR. IT IS AN INVALUABLE JOURNAL TO PRACTICAL PRACTICING

PHYSICIANS.

THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF UROLOGY, DR. WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, EDITOR, THE ONLY JOURNAL IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE DEVOTED EXCLUSIVELY TO GENITO-URINARY AND VENEREAL DISEASES IS $3.00 PER ANNUM, IN ADVANCE.

Some congenial physicians, tired of the deadening drudgery of a physician's life, decided to meet at more or less regular intervals, to dine together, to exchange impressions, in short, to have a jolly restful time. It was suggested that each of the members of this informal club prepare for each meeting a brief article-even of only a few lines for the amusement of his fellow members. The article should preferably be a mild satire, or a comment, on some of the evils of our profession, or on the foibles of our leaders. Some members objected on the score that they could not write. They were told that an interesting or amusing clipping would do. It was decided to print the members' contributions in the CRITIC & GUIDE, and we are glad that our readers will be able to participate once a month in this feast of wit and good humor.

Types of Medical Men

How very many interesting types of physicians there are. We have fewer commonplace members than any other affiliated body of men. You can classify the legal types under just a few headings. It is possible to make a classification of the legal profession as broad as would be implied by terms like honest and dishonest-no, no, we haven't done so, and the words we have just used are only illustrative of our general meaning. How very much alike undertakers are, a "grave" lot, surely, when on their cheerful jobs.

To

How, by the way, do men become undertakers? Theoretically, one might suppose that the State would find it necessary to subsidize such a class and that competition based upon the merits of the vocation would be unthinkable. say that somebody must bury us when we shuffle off doesn't seem a wholly adequate explanation of the surfeit of professional planters. When you were a child, reader, and made up your mind at different times to be an engineer, a cowboy, or even a New York policeman, did you ever yearn for the opportunity to plant your fellows, when dead, and to listen to the lamentations of bereaved relatives, not to speak of the platitudes of clerical orators who have a marvelous faculty for transfigurating deceased frauds into angels of light, at $10 (up) per transfiguration?

Speaking of the clergy, how alike they are. You know what Milton said: "New presbyter is but old priest writ large." This might be rendered to-day: scratch a high-church Episcopalian clergyman and you'll find a-(upon advice of counsel we decline to say what). Who couldn't tell a clergyman if he met one in a Turkish bath in the "altogether?" Probably you could identify one without his skin, so deeply branded are the hallmarks.

I.

There is a type of physician whom we have always labeled, in our minds, adventurer. By rights, he should have been an undertaker-or an undertaker's quarry while still of tender years. How he became a physician is as subtle a problem as how an undertaker becomes an undertaker. The idea of making sick people well is never a pet obsession with him. He regards the profession and the public as a seasoned Wall Street

operator regards those humans known as lambs. In his highest stage (perhaps we should say his lowest) of development he reveals himself as a "specialist." In fact, we think that no genuine adventurer could attain all his object did he remain. in the ranks. Adventurous general practitioners must be rare. To be a general practitioner (almost) necessarily implies good character.

Let us consider the adventurer, then, as a specialist.

He is always a factor in those organic movements which have some great good as their object. Not a prime factor, of course, but a very active unit, at least. A lay audience is "nuts" to him. Post-Graduate schools look very good to him and he is nearly always found on their faculties. If he can't get a place on a hospital staff, he organizes one and opens as a hospital an old frame building with a defective heating plant and some beds. After a while its training school for nurses is called after him. The Smith Training School for Nurses. Of course, the district in which he starts his "hospital" is adequately supplied with real hospitals, but that is no concern of his. Newly rich philanthropists "fall" to his flattery and pathetic representations, and achieve the smug fame of endowed beds and brass plate and the dignity and privileges of directorates. The State Board of Charities roasts his hospital in its reports, but nobody reads the reports. He is strong on personality and inveigles a good many medical men of standing into his schemes. If he can't break into a Post-Graduate faculty he simply starts one himself. He is apt to be mistaken for a captain of medical industry with the best motives. Study him, however, and you will invariably note that he has no executive ability and has to depend on others in matters of administration. He never carries any of the real burdens. The money that he makes is coveted solely as a means of selfish gratifications and display. Intimate conversation with him after the imbibition of a few highballs-for which he seems to have an unlimited capacity, reveals a mind centered upon the superficialities of life-dress, smart house appointments, lackeys and how to uniform them, social chatter about people whom he has perhaps met once but concerning whom he affects an easy familiarity, etc., etc. He is nearly always a vestryman in some church-always a churchman. He has, however, about as much appreciation of the genius of Christianity as a Turk. He never settles with tradesmen if he can help it, regards them and all who work with their hands as scum (and strange to say usually succeeds in getting these people to accept him at his own valuation and correspondingly demean and stultify themselves), wears the best of unpaid for clothes, is a great glad-hander and has a stack of judgments filed against him in the Hall of Records. Of course, if he can corral a rich wife his medical activities wane and his secular relations expand. Upon his well-tailored shoulders all his social (including his

marital) obligations rest lightly. He does attain his objects, but to the glory of God and of God's world, in which, after all, in Browning's phrase, "all's well," he never succeeds, for success in his case is a contradiction in the terms in which we express true conceptions of moral standards.

In a higher state of civilization, in which we may fancifully imagine the imposition of penalties after conviction for such offences as we have just sketched, we think that a fit punishment for him would be breaking stones for life with a rubber hammer.

II

There is another type of practitioner whom one occasionally meets who always excites a kind of sad interest. We are thinking of the man of whom it used to be said fifteen years ago that he promised exceptionally well, but who to-day is practising or teaching medicine in a dazed, dogged sort of way, his orientation somewhat disordered, and feeling that, somehow, he is not fulfilling his destiny.

As a matter of fact he is fulfilling his destiny and, if he only knew it, has been reasonably successful for a man of his type.

If you know a good deal about this type you can analyze it very readily. Dr. X as a young university man, bright, but possessed of no exceptional talent, became associated with some scientific worker of note, doing the drudgery end of research work, or else he became the assistant of some distinguished hospital physician or surgeon or college professor (under dog).

There you have the clue to the whole matter.

Because

of his affiliations X became obsessed of the notion that he was destined to have a "career" in the profession. And with his third-rate mind he did his best to consummate his ambition. And his Chiefs and his friends flattered him, of course.

Had our friend been less naïve, less honest, had he had a bit of the adventurer and a touch of the charlatan in him he might have had a"career," tho not of a sort that you or I, reader, would envy, and not of a sort that would see at its termination any less misery and suffering in the world.

Why, oh why, have the diligent years spent in London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna yielded only a harvest of Dead Sea fruit? That is the question that now preoccupies X himself constantly. You can read it in his face, in his gait, in his absent-minded manner.

He would not confess disillusion, probably, tho his pride and his manhood are a bit damaged.

It is only a pity in so far as such a type fails to discern that he could have done no better with the talents constituting his general equipment. Pride, however, is a dominating trait

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