president, the photo being from the famous "Zita" studio of Wien, which no doubt accounts for the strong foreign characteristics noticeable in the face. However, Dr. Spencer declares he is still loyal to the United States, and will devote his energies to making this year a banner one for the academy. THE BEXAR COUNTY MEDICAL SOCIETY. The Bexar County Medical Society, organized in 1853, the oldest and largest county society in Texas, met in annua. session at the St. Anthony, San Antonio, December 17th. It proved a harmony meeting free from medical politics, so often found limiting the membership and broader usefulness of many local medical organizations. On first ballot Dr. Thomas Dorbant was unanimously elected president. The other officers who were also elected by acclamation are: Vice-president, Dr. Conn Milburn; secretary, Dr. W. H. Hargis; treasurer, Dr. L. B. Jackson; delegate to the State Medical Association, Dr. C. D. Dixon, the retiring president, and alternate, Dr. R. L. Dinwiddie. Dr. Frank Paschal was re-elected censor for the next three years. Previous to the election of officers, a committee composed of Dr. William E. Luter, Dr. Hugh McIntosh and Dr. F. J. Combe was appointed to draft resolutions of condolence because of the death of Dr. Charles W. Trueheart. Dr. W. A. King, chairman of the board of control of the State Medical Association, spoke on the by-law to the association providing for legal assistance to practitioners who are sued for malpractice. and explained the assistance which the State organization would afford to physicians who are made the subjects of such suits. Dr. Hargis, secretary of the society, reported that the membership totaled 166, with an average attendance of fifty, as compared with thirty-five of the preceding year. Dr. Watts, of the legislative committee, reported that thirty-six cases of illegal practice had been investigated, of which number seventeen were tried and all but two convicted. Following the business session a fivecourse dinner was served in the St. Anthony tapestry dining room, Dr. L. K. Beck presiding as toastmaster. The medical officers of Fort Sam Houston, Drs. W. S. Chaplin, former head of Washington University. St. Louis, Mo., and S. Grover Burnett of Kansas City, Mo., were guests of the society. The after-dinner speakers were: Majors J. Dr. W. H. Carter, of Poolville, Tex., was shot to death by a fellow-townsman December 15th. Dr. J. W. Guinn and Miss Josie French of Palestine, Texas, were married at Waco, Texas, December 15th. The county of Bexar and city of San Antonio, Texas, are preparing to build a large modern general hospital. Dr. J. W. Carhart, inventor of the first automobile, died at San Antonio, Texas, December 21, at the age of 84 years. Dr. C. W. Trueheart of Galveston, 77 years of age, a respected physician, a frequent contributor to medical literature, a surgeon of the Confederate and FrancoPrussian wars, died at his home December 14th. The state law of Texas providing for lunatics to be tried by a jury of physicians was declared by Judge Masterson of the Fifty-fifth District Court to be unconstitutional, ruling that such trials must be before juries in the regular way. Miss Hedda Burgemeister, a trained nurse of San Antonio, Tex.. was indicted December 15th by the grand jury for the death of Otto Koehler, president of the San Antonio Brewing Co., November 12th. Miss Burgemeister is reported to have said that she did the shooting in self-defense. Dr. Geo. H. Moody, superintendent of the Moody Sanitarium for mental and nervous diseases, San Antonio, Texas, has continued to purchase and add additional grounds to his beautifully parked lawns till it embraces some twelve acres in the city suburb. The distribution of isolated buildings, carefully classifying the patients, are arranged so that all classes of patients have access to large tropical lawns the year round without contact. This institution is a credit to Dr. Moody and the profession. Jackson County Election.—At the annual meeting, December 1, 1914, the following officers were elected: President, J. M. Frankenburger; vice-president, W. J. Frick; secretary, R. E. Castelaw; treasurer, W. F. Kuhn; members of the House of Delegates to the Missouri State Medical Association, to serve for two years: Delegates: N. P. Wood, Jabez N. Jackson, Robert McE. Schauffler, David E. Broderick; alternates: C. Lester Hall, C. C. Conover, Richard L. Sutton, J. Q. Chambers. Executive Council -two members, to serve for three years: B. A. Poorman, Franklin E. Murphy. Heraldings War's only excuse from a European school book. Guess who? Huxley compared the physician to a chess player. The physician has opposite him an antagonist who must some day win a decisive game-that unseen player watches every move, he makes no haste, he plays fair, but while he makes no mistakes himself, he inexorably exacts the full penalty for every mistake of the physician-and the physician does not know all the rules of the game. Mr. Benson's remedy for war is radical, amusing, and perhaps effective. He would not give the power to declare war even to Congress, but would have the people vote on it. In case war was decided upon, those who voted for it should go first to the front. No one who voted against, would have to take up arms until every voter for war had enlisted. "If no war could take place without at least 8,000,000 affirmative votes," says Mr. Benson, "each representing a man who, in case of conflict must, if called upon join the army, there is no chance whatever that any of those opposed to war would ever have to fight. No nation ever assembled an army of 8,000,000 men. We should even take further measures to enable the fire eaters to eat the fire. We should compel each writer who urges aggressive war to sign his articles, and we should compel the publisher of such articles to send marked copies of his publications to the War Department. We should compel each public speaker and each member of Congress who urges aggressive war to file notice of such fact with the War Depart ment. In case fire eating gentlemen should so inflame the people that a majority of them should vote for war, the writers, speakers, and congressmen who urged war should be sent to the front ahead of everybody else and compelled to lead all bayonet charges, storm all forts and, in all cases, be nearest the enemy's guns. They should not be permitted to be officers, whatever their heroism or military ability. Officers of the higher sort usually sit back a few miles at the end of a telegraph wire where there is no particular danger. Gentlemen who urge offensive war, by voice or pen, should be kept in the ranks and given the fullest opportunity to glut their thirst for gore." P.I.L. "Prostatectomy should never be considered as an emergency operation."-F. C. Walsh. Song Sermons G. HENRI BOGART, M. D., Paris, Ill. ALL'S WELL. There's a planet floats, through blue ether, far, There's a castle reared in a city old Whose tall, traceried turrets, glinting gold Like fine, fairy fretwork, fling far, high; There's a lotus lights the lone Lybian lake, So wise Magi learned, when the world was youngIn putrescent ooze, writhing, rough roots choose That bright joy, perfumed, the pearled blooms diffuse, Though the miry source be unguessed, unsung. There's a man who wrought, with fell purpose base, What gave great, grand good to the time and race, And his fame spreads wide, as men's plaudits go: While the one who gave, from his soul and heart, The pure thought, in love, whence the deed did start, 'Neath a nameless stone, sleeps where none may know. Just now we are in the midst of the personified ideal of war, war such as the world of men has never before known, and will perchance never parallel. Nation after nation has plunged into the crimson vortex, each has applied all of the best of science, of accumulated acumen and advancement to the gentle art of wholesale murder, until we stagger, gasping in vain endeavor to comprehend. Newer and more and more deadly weapons have flashed into the arena, mechanical, electrical and chemical, until the wildest dreams of Jules Verne are but as penny pieces in a bank vault; but out of it all will come good. Ella Wheeler Wilcox says: "Great evil and great good, twin born, and Pope avers that, "Whatever is, is right." hold," To doubt the ultimate good of anything is to set your puny finite intelligence against the infinity of the All-Wisdom of Omnipotence. Beauty and grace and sweetness spring from the most unlikely sources. Should the war go to the limit, it will mean the end of the fallacy of "Armed Peace," wherein the best of brain and brawn is burned on the altar of the war god; it will mean the sweeping out into the sweeping out into universal space of the cobwebs of selfishness which have obscured the skies of progress. The suffering is awful beyond comprehension, but the result will be for aggregated happiness, for the compensating balance swings athwart the zenith. When one has a severe toothache he has the dentist to extract it; when a burrowing ulcer gnaws into the living tissues, the surgeon cuts it away; the operation is painful, with an ultimate result of freedom from pain. Though the war bring unspeakable suffering, the aggregate will be for a better, sweeter humanity, for the preparation for war bulks bigger in the end than does the present evil. Good grows from evil, else Omnipotence were a failure! An old man was given a bath in Atchison, Kas., the other day, the first he had taken in more than 27 years, and he now lies in a hospital at the point of death. Alas, all efforts to force modern sanitation upon our neighboring city seem fraught with disaster. Pathogenesis of Sympathetic Ophthalmia.-Deutschmann (Ophthalmoscope, Nov., 1913) after giving a brief review of the subject, draws the following conclusions: The results of my experiments and investigations on the pathogenesis of sympathetic ophthalmia may be summed up as follows: 1. I have succeeded by inoculation with particles taken from the choroid of a human eye affected with sympathetic ophthalmia in producing genuine sympathetic ophthalmia in monkeys and rabbits. 2. I believe that the exciting cause of sympathetic ophthalmia is a Gram-positive diplococcus; possibly a modified sarcina. 3. The second eye becomes diseased when the bacteria succeed in passing from the first eye into the lymph channels of the first optic nerve past the optic chiasma and through the lymph spaces of the second nerve into the orbit. 4. The course of the bacteria passing from the eye into the optic lymph spaces and vice versa, is a twofold one; either direct from the choroid into the intervaginal space, or along the anterior ciliary vessels from the eyeball, around it, within the musculature of the orbit, and eventually back of the eye along the central vessels into the spaces of the optic nerve, and vice versa. 5. The chronic inflammatory changes in the meninges consist of circumscribed foci, and cause no general symptoms." Incorporating ST. CLOUD COOPER, Fort Smith, Ark. T. D. CROTHERS, Hartford, Conn. S. S. GLASSCOCK, Kansas City, Kan. DISILLUSIONIZING WAR EXPERIENCES. of American physicians rushed over to Eng- land to take part in the great struggle, hoping to get a surgical experience that would make them famous in the future. Many of them were provided with certifi- cates and diplomas of who they were and what they had done, and expected to be sent, received and assigned in the course of a very hours. Then came a long period of waiting. The War office declared that there was a large waiting list, but some inside information indicated there was a great scarcity of medical men. By and by the edict of the War Department was that they would adhere to their former customs of not taking any one in the medical depart- possess an degree, or a degree that was recognized by the government authorities. Then the next assisting in major and minor operations or the transference of patients farther inland. While there was no friction between them and the regular army officers, it was evident that they were taking all the risks, and having no claims on the government for hospital service in the case of injury or disease except of the most temporary character. One of these enthusiastic men had his arm blown off by a shell, and as he was simply a Red Cross physician, he was entitled to but limited care and attention. He secured free transportation back to England, and then borrowed money to get home to America, and his native town. Whether he will be the great surgical hero of that section in the future, remains to be seen. to As the days go by, it is apparent that he field hospital and firing line surgeons are in as dangerous a position as the men in the trenches, and in some instances the mortality is very unusual. Whatever the surgeon may have picked up from his first aid to the wounded, and stored away in his note book, it was very evident that the expense and peril at which he accomplished this were terribly extravagant. Several of these surgeons after a few weeks experience of this kind have gone back to England or to the hospitals in the neighborhood of Paris and accepted menial positions; where they understood the French language, they have been warmly welcomed, but in the English hospitals, especially in the rear, there is a large number of detached medical men and students who are filling all the available places. It is evident that the American surgeons will return, with experience, but not of the kind that they expected, and that war, like many other things, will bring disillusions that had better be at home, than in a foreign country. T.D.C. means possible and to conserve health. It may engage in various activities which have these ends in view. At present the agency most needed in St. Joseph for the control and treatment of disease is a medical laboratory, and so this will be the first work to which the Foundation will address itself. The Foundation is under the auspices of the Southern Methodist Church, but is not sectarian. In fact it is unique in that five of the fifteen members cannot be members of that denomination. This prevents sectarianism and gives membership on the board of control to other churches and to capable men who may be members of no church. Church hospitals and social institutions do not have this provision, but are exclusively controlled by the church operating them. A medical laboratory is a public utility of such importance that the members of the Foundation believe the public at large should have a voice in its manage ment. It is the function of a medical laboratory to study by all known scientific methods the solids, fluids and parasites of the human body and to relate the information thus gained to the cure and prevention of disease. The scientific practice of medicine depends upon it. Without it the diagnosis of diphtheria cannot be made, the diseases of the blood determined, or the presence of syphilis established or a thousand other things done for the saving of life. The laboratory has come into common use in fighting diseases of the lower animals, but its use in human disease is very limited at present because so few exist or are available to the great mass of the people. There is a splendid veterinary laboratory and a splendid serum plant in St. Joseph offering every facility to sick cows, horses and hogs, but no adequate medical laboratory facilities are available for sick men, sick women and sick children. The incorporators of the Foundation follow: W. A. Bodenhausen, W. C. Bender, S. S. Connett, C. B. Duncan, Ralph Douglas, W. F. Goetze, Percy Johnson, Dr. W. H. Minton, Dr. Daniel Morton and the Rev. B. P. Taylor, St. Joseph; Paul M. Culver, Gower; M. H. Moore, Macon; Ira Richardson, Maryville; W. L. Scarborough, Macon, and A. C. Zumbrunnen, Columbia. Officers elected: W. A. Bodenhausen, president; Rev. B. P. Taylor, vice-president; Dr. Daniel Morton, secretary; W. F. Goetze, treasurer. The five officers and S. S. Connett, directors. Subscribe for the Medical Herald. |