reaction. The remedy is to use only transparent crystals of citric acid in making citrated caffein.

and bladders; it may also be used for the same purpose in the preservation of anatomical specimens, and will rid them of their bad smell.

M. It is evident that the work of conbining such a heterogeneous collection of drugs into a homegeneous balsam will call for more than ordinary skill. It is said, however, that the phenol compounds, e. g., tar, oil of cade, resorcin, guaiacol, etc., become associated in true chemical union with the camphor and menthol. The sulphur is obtained by precipitation from a hot saturated solution in oil of turpentine, and is treated afterward with the mixture of tar, oil of cade, castor oil and wool fat, all heated in a closed vessel at a high temperature. The acetone forms the solvent and vehicle.

CHLORAL AS A DEODORIZER.

Siegmund, in Wiener Klinische Wochcnschrift, recommends chloral hydrate to overcome the fetor of pulmonary gangrene. The effectiveness of this drug is readily proven by pouring into the cuspidor a few spoonfuls of a 1 to 3 in 100 solution. The use of a similar solution for washing out the mouth after the paroxysm of coughing renders the patient's breath tolerable.

Chloral is equally serviceable for deodorizing the evacuations of fetid bowels

MEDICINES WHICH INHIBIT
DIGESTION.

Physicians, in dispensing or prescribing medicines for their patients, do not always pay as much heed as they should to the physiological considerations governing the time and mode of their administration. Particularly is this the case in respect of the influence of the remedies upon the stomach and small intestine and their functions.

Thus a writer in the Journal of the A. M. A. aptly points out that a large number of drugs, especially alkaloids, even bitters, and alcoholic preparations in any amount, will inhibit the digestion more or less. In ordinary doses, however, the inhibition is probably but slight, and any drug or preparation that is an irritant to the stomach should certainly be administered either directly, or inside of an hour, after meals. Even bland, non-irritating tablets, pills and capsules should generally be administered after a meal, or at least with a large draught of water, and the tablets should be crushed before swallowing.

Potassium chlorate tablets should not be dissolved in the mouth, as the concencentrated saliva containing this solution when swallowed is irritant to the stomach and may cause inflammation, and even ulceration. Certainly such tablets should never be swallowed into the stomach, and there is no logical or rational reason for ever administering potassium chlorate internally.

Bromide tablets, salicylic acid or its salts in tablets, tablets containing ammonium chloride, and in fact most tablets, may cause irritation of the part of the mucous membrane on which they dissolve, if swallowed into the empty stomach, and most of the above-named tablets should be predissolved, or certainly

crushed before taking into the stomach at any time.

Quinine pills or tablets should never be taken on an empty stomach. If in any dose other than a small tonic one, quinine wil! slow peptic digestion. Consequently, if large doses are administered, it is well to give them between meals, swallowed with a few ounces, more or less, of milk or other simple, easily digestible food. If a patient does not sleep well, or does not get to sleep readily at night, the possibility of a tonic capsule or pill of quinine, or quinine and strychnine, or strychnine, given after the evening meal, being the cause of it should be considered, and the evening dose omitted. Also, many a patient is given hypnotics for insomnia, when the omission of the evening tea or coffee will allow normal sleep. It is physiologically wrong to give a hypnotic to a patient who is ill when he is being hyperstimulated by strychnine throughout the afternoon and evening.

For medication of the bowels with bismuth, large doses, or, perhaps better, frequent doses, are always needed, as doses unless very large, given at long distances apart, are likely to pass along with the food and not medicate the bowel mucous membrane at all. It is useless to expect that bismuth administered by the mouth will heal or medicate the mucous membrane of the colon.

If morphine must be administered and the patient is taking nutriment, if possible, it should not be given within one or two hours after a meal, as the digestion will certainly be inhibited.

SOFT CAPSULES.

L. Emmanuel, Jr., in the American Druggist, outlines the filling of soft (elastic) capsules by the retailer. He relates his experiments as to speed of solubility in artificial gastric juice as follows: Fresh home-filled, dissolved in eight minutes; one month old home-filled, in fourteen minutes; three months old, in

twenty minutes: a year old, in three hours and ten minutes; one manufactured capsule, in three hours and fiftyfive minutes, and another required fortyfour hours and five minutes.

The writer concludes his paper with the statement: "These results lead to but one conclusion and that is that physicians should demand freshly prepared home-made capsules and should make it imperative upon pharmacists to furnish. them."

IMPROVED MERCURIAL INJEC-
TIONS.

M. Desmoulières and M. Lafay, in a recent number of L'Union Pharmaceutique, have suggested a number of improved formulæ for the preparation of mercurial injections. Of the soluble salts of mercury they consider the benzoate of mercury to be the least painful, when rendered hypertonic by the addition of sodium chloride. It is prepared from freshly made mercury benzoate, dissolved in sterized distilled water to form a 1 per cent solution, with the addition of 2.5 per cent of sodium chloride. The solution is injected daily in doses of 30 to 45 minims. This formula was devised by Professor Gaucher, who preferred a 1 per cent. solution to any other strength on account of its stability and the ease with which it is tolerated by the patient. In order to render the injection perfectly painless, the addition of cocaine has been suggested, but this addition has many objections. It is better to introduce sufficient pure saccharose, as suggested by Fleig, to produce an isotonic solution. A very satisfactory injection may be prepared in the following way: Dissolve recently prepared mercury benzoate 1 gram, pure sodium chloride 1 gram and pure saccharose 10 grams in sufficient sterilized distilled water to produce 100 cubic centimetres of solution. It is important to avoid reducing the mercuric salt during the process of sterilization, and on this account it is

preferable to filter the solution through a porous cylinder rather than use an autoclave. The same formula is advantageously used in the preparation of injections of biniodide of mercury, which usually cause the patient considerable pain. Such a solution is best prepared by dissolving recently made mercuric iodide 1 gram, pure dry sodium iodide 1 gram, and pure saccharose 10 grams, in sufficient sterilized distilled water to produce 100 cubic centimetres of solution. Injections made in this way are less painful than those prepared with the addition of cocaine.

POTASSIUM IODIDE PILLS. The National Druggist reports that M. Goevaerts, after experiencing difficulty in making pills of this substance with ordinary excipients, hit upon the following plan, which he finds very satisfactory:

For each pill containing 0.20 gm. (3) grains) of the salt, he uses starch 0.04 gm., powdered acacia 0.08 gm.; and calcined magnesia 0.10 gm.; massing with a liquid consisting of glycerin, 20 parts, syrup 50 parts, and alcohol 30 parts. He finds these pills readily disintegrate in water and are perfectly stable.

DILUTING MORPHINE.

A correspondent of the Physicians' Drug News wants to mix ten grains sulphate morphia with five or six times its bulk of some equally soluble (in water) inert powder that would not change the efficacy of the morphine, even on being intimately mixed together for a month. or more, and asks whether rochelle salts or bromide potassium would answer the purpose.

The Drug News replies that it would not be advisable to mix morphine with either rochelle salts or bromide potassium, as they are incompatible, rendering the morphine insoluble. The best and safest substance for reducing the strength of morphine we would consider

to be pure cane sugar or milk sugar. Both are soluble in water and may be considered inert, especially for the quantity used.

IMPURE APOMORPHINE.

Harnock and Brandt, in Muenchener Med. Wochenschrift, point out that many specimens of apomorphine on the market are very impure and contain a large percentage of the polymeric trimorphine. Where one-half milligram of pure apomorphine will cause prompt emesis, two milligrams of the impure drug are necessary, proving that only 25 to 33 per cent is really apomorphine and the rest trimorphine. The latter acts very much like morphine and may cause paralysis of the respiratory centers. The pure salt dissolves to a faintly alkaline solution, which soon turns green, while the impure preparation is white and more voluminous; the solutions are acid and do not change color so readily. Many cases of retarded and poisonous action can probably be explained by this toxicity.

THERAPEUTICS OF OXALIC ACID. J. C. McWalter writes to the Lancet that he has used oxalic acid with apparent success in sciatica. The dose given was one grain three times daily. The British Pharmaceutical Coder suggests that the dose is from a quarter to a half grain, but the correspondent has found that this can be exceeded with impunity.

Many observers believe that oxalic acid, or at least some of the oxalates, have a specific effect in inflammatory conditions of the gastric mucous membrane. Such has been my experience with oxalate of cerium, which McWalter used pretty extensively for the purpose.

It is stated that a lemonade of oxalic acid-five or six grains to the pint-is used in France as a febrifuge. The correspondent has not tried so daring a dose, but is inclined to think that so much might be taken with safety.

THE PAWLOW DOGS.

Editor MEDICAL BRIEF:

"We are

A colleague wrote to me: both members of the American Association, and I am writing as a member of that association to ask whether or not you are the author of an article entitled, "The Scientific Torture Chamber," which was published in the MEDICAL BRIEF of St. Louis about the year 1906; also whether this article was reprinted and circulated by the anti-vivisectionsts with your knowledge and permission, and also what you meant by the words, "establish a factory to supply the market" with gastric juice, and upon what information this statement is based?"

I do not know the writer personally who addresses me in this remarkable way, but I shall answer him publicly. He and his association wish to know the truth about the Pawlow Dogs, and I say habeant sibi!

I do not remember whether the antivivisectionists had asked my permission or not to reprint my article on the "Scientific Torture Chamber." As a matter of course, they did not need such permission. The title, "Scientific Torture Chamber," had been given by a German medical journal, in which a paper of Dr. Stadler, of Leipzig, was quoted at great length.

At a meeting of the German Medical Society of the City of New York, on November 4, 1907, one of the physicians of the Rockefeller Institute read a paper on the Pawlow experiments and clinical observations of increased stomach secretion, and this paper was discussed. This lecture is recorded in the New York Medizinische Monatsschrift, 1907, pp. 282-283. In giving the description of the Pawlow experiments, the reader of

the paper demonstrated pictures in lifesize of dogs, showing the opening of the esophagus and the stomach fistula, and how the gastric juice is collected in a vessel attached to the dog. This paper was in fact only a repetition of a paper read before the same society one month previously by myself, in which the Pawlow experiments were described exactly as Dr. Stadler has described them. This description has been published in many journals and books in America, first in the MEDICAL BRIEF, December, 1906. The paper read by me in German, October 7th, 1907, before the German Medical Society, I repeated in English before the Medical Society of the Greater City of New York, on October 21, 1907, and both papers were published: in German, in the N. Y. Medis. Monatsschrift, October, 1907; in English, in the N. Y. Medical Journal, November 16, 1907; and also in the Deutsche Med. Presse, of Berlin, January 6, 1908.

Prof. Pawlow's laboratory has been visited by Dr. Ed. Stadler, assistant of the Leipzig Medical Clinic. In the Muenchener Mediz. Wochenschrift, 1905, p. 1, he writes in a long article as follows: "The reports on the special work done in Pawlow's Institute awoke in me the desire to learn the arrangements there from personal observation. For this reason, I went to St. Petersburg last year, and through Prof. Pawlow's kindness I was permitted to attend the experiments which were going on for several weeks, to witness a number of the operations and to execute some of them personally.

"All the animals used for experimental purposes are large, heavy dogs, weighing about 20 or 30 kilos. On my first visit I was surprised by the remarkable aspect of this so-called 'Factory for

Natural Gastric Juice. In a row on a long table there were six of these dogs, imprisoned in crates. Each dog has a stomach fistula, and the esophagus has an opening cut out at about the middle of the neck. The dogs swallow with avidity pieces of meat placed before them in basins, but, the esophagus being cut, the meat falls back into the basin to be swallowed over and over again. Simultaneously the fistula in the stomach yields abundant quantities of an acid, limpid, gastric juice, of which these 'factory dogs' produce three-quarters to one litre each in the course of one forenoon. This juice is conducted through a Chamberland filter, and now forms a regular article of commerce under the caption of 'Natural Gastric Juice' ('kommt als natürlicher Magensaft in den Handel')."

This is the exact description Dr. Stadler gives of Pawlow's Factory, as he calls it, and as he says it is called.

New York City.

ACHILLES ROSE, M. D.

DRUG HABIT.

Editor MEDICAL BRIEF:

In successfully treating the drug habit, we must remember that our patient is the subject of a true nerve disease or nerve derangement from the use of drugs, and one who is likely to become, if not already, morally insane. I believe, after treating something over 1,000 cases, that it is very necessary to use much psychologic therapeutics. You must talk to your patient along the lines of uprightness of character, equality of man, etc., each individual case suggesting its own line. Keep their minds occupied with. something they are interested in, and keep them busy; give them cheerful surroundings and cheerful as well as careful companions.

This can almost never be accomplished at home. New scenes mean very much to them, and surroundings not neces

sarily strict, but not with the liberties of home.

Electricity is of great value in toning. up the muscles and increasing nutrition. Static electricity, and especially the Morton wave current, is very valuable in these cases. Sparks often relieve the pains in the legs of the drug habitué. The above, with proper massage of menthol and methyl salicylate, I find is very effective in getting them off the drug and relieving the pain.

Bear in mind that sleep is very essential in these cases, and especially so if it be an alcoholic bordering on delirium tremens. Tincture lupulin, monobromate of camphor, with the aid of the static breeze, will usually make them sleep. I give all treatment myself, as it keeps me in closer touch with my patient and is also a part of the psychologic treatment. If you carry your patient through seventy-two hours without "dope" he is cured. Then all he needs is to drive him out in the open air and give him good, nutritious diet, and, above all, never send him home taking a "tonic." W. S. ROBINSON, M. D.,