has here no relation at all to the length of the worm. Suppositories of garlic (another food cure) may be used with like efficiency for the extermination of the noisome ascarides. To destroy a colony of these pests root and branch one suppository must be used every second evening for twelve days. At the end of that period the last egg has been hatched and every worm has been killed before having had time to lay more eggs. But to return to

our rice-water and cholera Asiatica. Ricewater has this to recommend it: It is a fine nutriment of marked characteristics. It may be taken in almost unlimited quantities. It may be taken ice-cold. Now, cold drinks, in great quantities, and very immediate support by nutriment (if it is possible to give it) are from the dietetic standpoint imperatively demanded in diseases similar to cholera Asiatica, and therefore possibly in that disease also. Add to this the exact kind of stimulant (probably some particular alcoholic liquor) that may prove best adapted, and the success of our treatment of this disease may be rendered still more effective, for it is an important fact that any food properly assimilated in sickness will not interfere with the action of medicinal remedies.

Combined in the form of mutton broth rice affords a diet of a most nutritive character, which can be taken well in gastritis or gastro-enteritis, when almost any other food will aggravate.

On the other hand beef and beef tea will make a diarrhoea, or still more a dysentery, worse and worse all the time. (Don't tell this to the manufacturing chemist, or he will have a beef tea on the market in a few days which has been deprived of the principle that causes this aggravation.)

Beef tea as made at home is slightly nutritious and a pleasant drink for certain halfsickness, but beef tea as sold in the drug stores, from the abomination of Liebig to the latest, is an unmitigated delusion and a repulsive snare. It is not known to possess a curative value in any disease.

Chicken broth, the time honored, is the worst of all, and the first (if you do not forestall it) to be given where the stomach is enfeebled.

Fresh ripe peaches will cure a recent dysentery, and that succulent fruit is allowable to the sufferer from that disease, who frequently suffers from hunger and yet dare not eat

"under penalty." With nice mutton broth and peaches we can help him immensely. A theological student was once asked by his professor to give an instance of the rule of a special Providence in the world. The student thought the fact that Portugal produced both port-wine and the cork tree, was a clear demonstration of such special Providence. That dysentery is most frequently in the peach season is probably another demonstration equally good. Certain deep-seated cachexia, which threaten the life of their victim by a general failure of nutrition, and which are often due to malaria, are cured perfectly by the grape diet. Patients of this class go to vineyards and eat grapes for many days, many pounds daily, and nutrition is thereby re-established, as can be done by no other food known.

The value of the grape as an anti-malarial is not fully appreciated. As a tonic in the various kinds of wine it is better known. As an aggravator of gout it has long been celebrated, especially port-wine. But even grapes by the basketful, as well as grapes in the vineyard, are a fine cure for the malarial debility so frequent in this climate. They much surpass in value the traditional lemon, which in that disease is truly a good deal of a fraud, though of great value in scorbutus. The cure of scorbutus and of nursing sore mouth by fresh vegetables, are worthy of note. Old rye whisky in very small doses at or after meals is invaluable for the mildly dyspeptic, and is an almost instantaneous cure for many cases of periodical and violent gastro-enteralgia. Champagne will often abort a gastrocephalalgia, or "sick headache." Old rye is mentioned particularly, because as a medicinal whisky it far surpasses that distilled from corn. Ales and beers are indispensable to the perfect nutrition of some who without them are always just enough below par to be constantly miserable, and on the verge of use

lessness.

The malt liquors are, at one and the same time, drinks, slight stimulants, digestives, and true foods. The growing crusade against the use of liquors in any form is unphysiological. It is to real dietetic and hygienic reform what a crank is to a man of sense. I have seen a general neuralgia, that had been under treatment by strong medicines for six weeks without effect, banished totally in three days by the use after meals and at bed-time of not over one ounce daily of whisky. I could re

The German "sour wine," claret, port, champagne, rye whisky, ale, porter, and lager beer, each has its specific nutritive value. A girl of twelve, under my care, nearly dead from the blood-poisoning of scarlet fever, revived as if by magie under the influence of a full pint of good port-wine taken within twelve hours. She would take absolutely nothing else. Liquors are the food-cure for the neuralgias. Neuralgias dependent upon carious teeth and similar causes are not included. I refer only to the typical neuralgias.

Reduce to a minimum the fat and fluid, the sugars and starch of the obese patient, and you will reduce his obesity rapidly. Cutting off fluid alone from one unwieldy man reduced him thirteen pounds in a month. Abolishing the potato in the diet of a fat woman reduced her twelve pounds in a month. Sometimes the excessive fat accumulates from one of these sources only (fats, fluids, sugars and starches), sometimes from more than one. But hardly can obesity continue without any of them. This is a food cure and a correct one. It surpasses by far the meat diet system of Banting, which was wrong because oppressive and otherwise injurious. Yet some crank once flooded the market with "Anti-fat." The other method is a true example of a food

cure.

Bright's disease and diabetes mellitus are both influenced largely (the latter, indeed, is held completely in check if taken in time) by dietetic treatment only, as we all know. Ice cream (real ice cream, not frozen eggs, corn starch and gelatine) is curative in acute gastritis. It is relished, as nearly all curative and proper foods are, when nothing else is. This choice of the sick organism is a wonderful instinct, and may be trusted immensely. It will, if carefully interrogated, often prove our only guide to the true remedial food in a given case.

A woman who had been sick for two years with diabetes insipidus, and who was almost on her death-bed, passing six quarts of urine daily, was snatched from a watery grave (so to speak) by being allowed a diet of half a

gallon of buttermilk daily, a food for which she herself expressed a strong preference, say. ing that it was the only thing she had craved for months, but her advisers had prohibited it. In one month the urine fell to three pints daily, and she made a good recovery.

In short, were we to search the ground over thoroughly, so far as it is at present known, we should find that we are already in possession of a respectable materia medica consisting entirely of the specific relations of foods to diseases. Individualization here too, we find just as necessary as in the department of drugs, and will yield just as fine results. The consumptive finds his only cure yet in a change of climate, that is to say in a food; for air is that form of food which we imbibe through the lungs, and respiration is but a phase of nutrition.

I doubt not that a more thorough canvassing of this special subject would bring to light and enable us to classify a great many foods in such a manner as to show their specific value in disease, and thus enable us to cure our patients cutior, tutior, et juamdior than we can do without knowing how to feed them.

We know the immense importance of diet in the treatment of typhoid fever. We know how easily here a slight error may prove fatal. We know how in many asthenic and zymotic diseases our patients sink from sheer exhaustion, unless we can find a food which in a given disease they can take, will take, and can assimilate. If in such cases we can readily support the patient's strength for a brief day or week, we can often gain a victory otherwise not to be gained at all. The rule will work negatively as well as positively. Mrs. H. had been a sufferer from a painful chronic diarrhoa for two years. No treatment afforded relief. Duodenal and intestinal digestion was somehow at fault. She was asked to abstain altogether from starch, i. e., from potatoes and corn. She did so, and her diarrhoea improved from the day she began the change of diet, and in three weeks had ceased entirely, not to return. The physiologist aided in this prescription, for he it is who has taught us that starches are digested in the mouth and below the stomach. Cutting off the starches, we give rest to the organs that digest them, and our remedies hasten to perfect the cure.

I have been led to prepare this meagre paper chiefly because I think I have proved by many years of trial the supreme value of

one food in many sicknesses, and have lately learned the value of another in graver cases of blood poisoning. To call attention to these two foods is the real value of my contribution, if it has a value. The foods in question are buttermilk and unfermented grapejuice.

Of all the foods in daily use among us, not only as a food for sickness, but also as a food in health, there is not, in my opinion, a single one which for ease of digestion and complete nutritive value can compare with buttermilk. Try it, as I have done, in atonic dyspepsia; in the debility of mal-nutrition; in chronic sluggishness of the liver; even in enlargements of that organ not due to malignant disease; in renal disorders, or in hepatic disorders characterized by deranged renal secretions; in renal tenderness; in predisposition to renal calculi; in chronic cystitis; in malarial "spring fever;" in the failure of appetite that occurs in very warm weather, when ordinary food palls, and the victim is not sick but too weak for work. Try it even in gastric ulcer, and in cancer of the liver and stomach, not to cure these latter, but to save the patient from dying miserably of starvation and cancer combined, when he may be led to die with comparative comfort of the cancer only. Try it in anything, and if it does not agree, try something else. It will not do for new-born infants, nor will it cure everything; but try it often enough, and then, and then only, will you know its true value. If I were asked to live hereafter on one food only, that food should be good, fresh, pure buttermilk. Do not entertain the anserine notion that koumiss is a great food, and buttermilk a waste product; for the fact is, buttermilk is a great food, and koumiss is a poor substitute for it.

Consider what buttermilk is. It is milk, all but its oil, which is the least nutritive of all its components, and the least needed by the sick. And milk is the type of a pure and sweet and perfect nutriment, containing all the necessary elements of the animal organism, the sole food of the mammalia kingdom in its infancy.

But buttermilk is milk that has been partially digested by the churn, and the older it is, within certain limits, the more digested it is by changes going on in its elements. These changes have to do largely with the develop ment of lactic acid. Buttermilk casein will not form a solid curd like that of sweet milk, but forms that first proper product of digest

ing milk, a light, flucculent curd, offering no resistance to to further digestive changes. Furthermore it is plentiful, and finally, it is cheap. What more do we want?

I must add that it is the diet above all others in typhoid, malarial and remittent fevers. To illustrate, I have now under my care a case of typhoid fever, which has run through three complete courses of the disease, lasting in all thirteen weeks. Temperature during the first course rose to 105; during the second to 1043; during the third to 1031. His was not a mild case. Able counsel and myself at one time allowed him twenty-four hours to live. His daily diet consisted of one quart or more of fresh buttermilk; one pint and more of unfermented grape-juice, with which was mixed one-third of a pint of the best port-wine. The patient not only lived through this ordeal, but he is emerging in good condition, whereas formerly such patients under my care, when I could not find a diet that would agree, or that they would take, came out like skeletons, and underwent a most protracted recovery.

These remarks do not exhaust buttermilk, but they serve to suggest a line of study and experiment which promises us ample reward.

Now as to unfermented grape juice. I am not the advertising agent of any pharmacy, yet it is but just to all concerned that I should state that the grape juice I have used this winter is that sold by Gross & Delbridge, of Chicago. It differs much from several other brands in the market. It can be obtained, I suppose, at any good pharmacy. A single taste suffices to prove its unsophisticated character. It has the odor and flavor of fresh grape juice, nothing less and nothing more. It will ferment, also, like fresh grape juice, in three days after opening the bottle.

The composition of grape juice is nearer to that of milk than is that of any other organic fluid. Its nutritive value is in part indicated by that fact. But its special value is as a food in zymotic diseases of a violent character, such as scarlet fever and diphtheria. During the past winter grape juice has done for me just this one inestimable service- it has given me a food--the only food that little patients, endangered by these diseases, could or would take. When I had found a food of which a boy four years old would drink one and a half pints daily, and ask for more, while he would absolutely refuse all

other food, I had found a means whereby the strength of his organism could be maintained for ten days, during a raging scarlatina, with a temperature of 100 and a pulse of 180 per minute; and that fact saved my little patient's life.

It has served me equally well in other cases both of scarlet fever and diphtheria. The best element in the food is that the sick relish it, long for it, drink it with pronounced gusto, and in short demonstrate that it meets the specific want of the organism in these conditions.

It is a fine food apart from these conditions, and available wherever the " grape cure may be effective. When exhaustion threatens collapse, port wine ought to be mixed with the grape juice, in whatever quantity the result justifies.

It would seem, from witnessing the effects of specific foods in severe sicknesses, that the whole organism is not sick even in zymotic disease. There are still some healthy elements left in it, which form the nuclei around which may rally the demoralized remnants of the panic-stricken system. Cut off all appropriate food, and these elements sink from exhaustion, and the patient succumbs. But sustain these still nourishable elements by any diet suitable to them, and the recovery of the patient is so far assured.

I doubt not that the experience of many members of this Association could reveal the values of many foods; and if any members, or any readers of this article, would be kind enough to forward to my address succinct, definite and available reports of their observations in this department, I will, with due acknowledgment, present the same in shape for practical service at the next meeting of the Association. Address all such communications to R. N. Foster, M. D., 10 Warren Av., Chicago.

INTERNATIONAL HOMEOPATHIC CONVENTION OF 1886.

To the Editors of the Medical Era

My Dear Colleagues:

At the Convention held in London in 1881, it was determined to hold the next meeting at Brussels with the view of providing a central and neutral place at which the Continental Homœopathists (hitherto so sparsely represented at our gatherings) might meet one another and their British and American

colleagues. I was desired to act as permanent secretary of the Convention; and in that capacity I communicated the choice made to Dr. Martiny, editor of the Revue Homœopathique Belge, requesting him to make it known to the Homoeopathists of Belgium. In due time I learned from him that the Association Centrale des Homœopathes Belges, had accepted the task of organizing the meeting, and had appointed a committee for the purpose. To this body, accordingly, I made over my responsibilities, putting myself at their disposal for any counsel or assistance they might require.

I now learn, to my great regret, that our Belgian colleagues find themselve unable to complete the task they have undertaken. Disappointed at the paucity of men and material with which they are threatened, they declare the Congress impracticable, and wish to adjourn it to 1889, making Paris its seat, on the occasion of a Universal Exhibition then to be held. It seems to me that this proposal cannot be accepted. Our International Conventions must be regularly quinquenial, if they are to be kept up at all; and the reasons for preferring Brussels to Paris on this occasion continue to hold good. Many of us have made our arrangements to attend; our own British Congress has been omitted this year to enable us to do so; and it is most undesirable at this late hour to change the plans determined on.

I therefore feel it my duty to maintain the resolution entrusted to me to be carried out; and in default of the Homœopathists of Belgium must myself take the initiative in its execution. I accordingly give notice that the International Homœopathic Convention of 1886 will be held at Brussels on Tuesday, the 3d, Wednesday, the 4th, and Thursday, 5th, of August next; the first day to be devoted to general considerations bearing on Homœopathy, the second to Materia Medica, and the third to Clinical Medicine. The exact place and hours of meeting shall be announced in your next issue.

Being called upon thus late to organize the Convention, I earnestly appeal to my colleagues throughout the world for their co-operation and assistance. Let those who are able at once send me papers on the subjects mentioned as those to be considered, andas funds will be required the contributions of all who desire to see the Convention adequately carried out are hereby solicited.

SUBSCRIBERS to the MEDICAL ERA are hereby reminded that many subscriptions expire with this number, which is the last of Vol. III. All over-due subscriptions should be sent in at once, and renewals for Vol. IV. should be forwarded without delay.

AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF HOMEOPATHY. Com mittee on railroad fares. Iowa City, Iowa, May 22d, 1886. The Central Traffic Assocition which controls all lines east from Chicago, St. Louis and Cincinnati, grants a return to all points within its territory at onethird fare to all who have paid full limited fare going. In order to secure this reduction it is peremptory that each person on purchasing their ticket have filled out a "starting point certificate" by the agent of whom the ticket is purchased. When this has been endorsed by myself at Saratoga it will secure a return ticket at one-third fare. CERTIFICATES GOOD UNTIL JULY 20th. Those who fail to comply with this rule will not get the benefit of the reduced rate. The Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railway have kindly consented that these rates and rules shall apply to all points on their system, including Kansas City, Council Bluffs and intermediate points, outside the territory controlled by the Central Traffic Association. No stop-over privileges are allowed.

These certificates can only be obtained by addressing me at Iowa City, Iowa. In ordering them it will not be sufficient for one person to order several in his own name. In every instance I must have the name of the person who is expected to use the certificate before it can be sent.

In all cases it will be absolutely necessary for parties to return over the same route they take in going.

The long limit allowed for returning is quite an unusual concession, and has been made in order that members and their families may have abundance of time for rest and recreation after the adjournment of the Institute. Yours fraternally,

A. C. COWPERTHWAITE,
Chairman Committee.

PROCEEDINGS OF THE ILLINOIS HOMEOPATHIC MEDICAL

ASSOCIATION.

The thirty-first annual meeting of this Association was held at the Grand Pacific Hotel, Chicago, May 18, 19 and 20, 1886.

TUESDAY.- -MORNING SESSION.

At 10 o'clock the Association was called to order by the President, H. M. Bascom, M. D., of Ottawa, who delivered the following address:

Ladies and Gentlemen Members of the Illinois Homœopathic Medical Association: It seems but a few days since at our last annual meeting in Peoria, I endeavored to thank you for the honor bestowed upon one of your younger members, by electing him to be your presiding officer for this session. A year has passed, and now I welcome you to this meeting, which will soon be only a matter of history. I welcome you in the name of the officers of of the association, and in the name of the physicians of this city.

The history of a society must necessarily be the acts and expressed sentiments of its individual members. If you will follow me a short time I will endeavor to interest you, even as I have been interested, in the growth and development of this society, and its individual members. Some of them were present at its birth. They, with others, have watched it and nourished it through its diseases of childhood, through various epidemics, and, after looking at its fully developed condition, now on its 31st birthday we bespeak for it a long life and a hearty old age, with many friends and benefactors.

On the sixth day of December, 1855, in Peoria, this society was formed and named. Some eighteen adherents of Homoœpathy were present, and entered into its discussions. To-day I can find only seven of the original members living: Dr. Guilbert, of Iowa; Drs. Smith, Pratt, Colton of Chicago; Davis, of Henry; Anthony, of Princeton; Carr, of Peo