The State Board of Medical Examiners is working in perfect harmony, and already the influence of the medical practice act under which they work is being felt throughout the state in the exclusion of many quacks and incompetent practitioners. Examinations for license to practice, which they conduct in the several grand divisions of the state, are fair, not difficult to a moderately qualified applicant, and yet show their imperative necessity in the number of insufficiently educated applicants whom the board rejects. The board as at present constituted has an eclectic member and homeopathic member, and these work in full coöperation with the regulars, making themselves very useful in the board and are ever ready to aid in any advances desired. Why then should they be disturbed in their labors? What reason is there to offer for adding an osteopath to the state board? These people claim not to practice medicine, and are supposed not to prescribe medicine of any kind, therefore why should they have representation on a board which passes upon the qualifications of applicants to practice medicine? And furthermore, why should osteopaths, who are classed as professional masseurs, and are required by this state merely to register their diplomas, be placed upon the same plane as practitioners of a science of the highest class, and which has been developing for hundreds of years? If it is necessary to restrict the practice of osteopathy, an amendment to the present law could be passed requiring these practitioners to come before the board of medical examiners and stand an examination which would determine whether they had sufficient knowledge of the subjects of anatomy, physiology, pathology and minor surgery to practice their art. It seems to us that the province of osteopathy should be more clearly defined, and that osteopaths should be required to discriminate more carefully in the cases which they undertake to treat. Every medical man recognizes the value of massage in those conditions known under the general head of neurasthenia, rheumatic conditions of the muscles and joints, various kinds of paralysis and other pathological states kindred in nature to these, but when osteopaths claim that they can relieve or cure constitutional diseases by rubbing they are exceeding their province in the attempt to beguile Vol. 25-8

the wary dollars from the pockets of the public. In our own experience we know of one instance where a patient with pulmonary consumption was told by an osteopath that he could cure him with massage, and only recently a patient with an attack of subacute laryngitis was told by an osteopath that he could cure him of this trouble very speedily, and the patient informed the writer that the only treatment used by the osteopath was to rub the back of his neck! Such imposition as this is likely to react decidedly to the disadvantage of the practitioners of this form of treatment, and they would gain in the good will of the medical profession and the public by limiting their claims to the possibilities of massage.

The medical profession of the State of Tennessee deserves a great deal of credit for its efforts in the past to secure adequate laws regulating the practice of medicine in this state, and while those we now have are not everything that could be desired, still they have had a most salutary influence, and this state is slowly but surely being elevated by the workings of the medical practice act, which so efficiently has been administered by the present board of medical examiners, to a position where practitioners in the state can point with pride to the high class of the personnel of the physicians here engaged in practice. It is to be hoped that the general assembly will not be influenced into adopting any amendment or amendments to the act at its present session, for none so far offered would have any other effect but to work to the detriment of the medical profession of the state, and therefore to the people in general.

AT LAST!

IN a recent issue of the New York Herald we find three columns, with display type headlines on the first page, announcing that "cancer's cause and its cure are found at last!" Accompanying this article are photographs of Dr. Roswell Park, director of the Gratwick Patholological Laboratory of the University of Buffalo, and of the cancer cells "discovered by Gaylord to be the parasite of cancer." This article states that "experimentally considered the questions of the cause of

cancer and its absolute curability are settled facts. What remains now is the application of the results of animal experimentation to the cure of the disease as it exists in the human being." Continuing it describes the work carried out by Drs. Gaylord and Clowes at the cancer laboratory of the State Department of Health, through whose experiments on mice infected with cancer it is claimed an antitoxic serum has been discovered which visibly affects the growth of cancer in mice, and in a number of cases has been sufficiently active to cause the total disappearance and cure of tumors of considerable size.

Truly the medical profession seems to have been in the dark as to the value of Gaylord's discovery, for we have been laboring under the impression that the parasite which Gaylord isolated has not been accepted as the cause of cancer, for the results of investigations in this direction have been far from conclusive. That cancer is parasitic in origin is even far from probable, according to the report of the Harvard Cancer Commission, just announced.

That "classic cancers were produced in mice inoculated with cells from cancers" could hardly be held as conclusive as to the propagation by these same cells of a malignant growth in man. An irritant product in a mouse or other lower animal might show cancerous construction—that is, heterogeneous cell structure-but still it will require much more profound evidence to determine that human cancers might likewise be produced.

The experiments which these investigators carried out in the development of a curative serum for cancer are even more interesting, for they are working along the line which gives more promise of success in the treatment of malignant conditions than any other kind of therapy. In serum treatment we believe lies much of the future of medicine, and although the results of Gaylord and Clowes, who claim to have caused the disappearance of new growths in mice by injections of serum produced from infected mice must necessarily be carefully weighed before being accepted as conclusive, still their efforts no doubt are being directed into the proper channel, and one of much future promise.

We learn from the article in the Herald that Drs. Gaylord and Clowes are soon to read papers before scientific bodies detailing the progress of their work, and then shall we be enabled to form an accurate estimate of what they have accomplished. In the meantime we trust that no one will be misled by newspaper articles which claim such sensational success, for we greatly fear that much time will yet elapse. before it can be truly said, as we have headed this editorial, that the cause and cure of cancer have been found at last.

“THE MASQUERADER.”

CONTEMPORARY fiction is responsible for a number of peculiar states, and for many absurd deductions, and it is indeed the exception when a novelist shows sufficient acquaintance with medicine to be even fairly accurate when discussing subjects which have to do with anatomical and physiological facts. Stevenson, in his "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," delved in the realms of psychology, and presented a study of that interesting psychological impossibility-a dual personality. Impossible because while it is quite true that we may have exhibitions of that peculiar state of second self called the subliminal mind, which is capable of receiving suggestions and executing these as though 'twere quite another individual, yet there can be no change of idenity. An example of this is given by hypnotists with their receptive subjects, who have suggested to them while in the hypnotic state various things for them to do or say when they are awakened from the trance. But even medical writers cannot always be depended upon to be exact in their descriptions of pathological conditions when they attempt the lighter field of general literature, for so well known a writer as Conan Doyle has been guilty of departures from verisimilitude in his descriptions of disease in some of his writings.

Beyond a doubt the most popular of recent novels is the one by Katherine Cecil Thurston, entitled "The Masquerader." Interesting beyond measure, this story takes for its motive something not altogether new in literature, but a subject always capable of affording entertainment and evoking dis

cussion. The story deals with two men, one of whom is a statesman of considerable ability, but who is addicted to the morphine habit, and who is beginning to evidence the direful effects of this drug after five or six years of its use in that he is captious, forgetful and indifferent. His wife is to him a wife in name alone, for he does not seek her society, and she, a splendid woman in every respect, lives in a social world almost to herself. The other man, with whom the world has not dealt kindly, has splendid mental attainments, and is ambitious, and yet has received so many of the world's hard knocks that he has become a skeptic and misanthrope. These men meet one day in a London fog, and engage in conversation, and the fog veil lifting for a moment both are astonished to find that the one is a replica of the other. Physically they are exact counterparts. No one, even the most intimate associate, could detect a difference. The opium eater, dissatisfied with life, suggests to the other that they exchange identities for a time, he, a man of wealth, to pay the other to take up his life at certain intervals when called upon, and to relinquish this office on demand. At first horrified by the idea, the other is finally induced by the novelty of the proposition held out to do as requested. They exchange positions for a period of two or three weeks; the poor and ambitious individual takes up the work of the statesman, begins to astonish the latter's friends by reassertion of what they regarded as a declining brilliant individuality, begins to awaken an interest in himself on the part of the wife, and no one suspects that he is not the man whom he is representing. This goes on with occasional intervals, places being exchanged from time to time, the double improving the political outlook of the statesman each time he takes his place, with a consequent relapse when the other reassumes his place, until finally, just as he reaches a political climax, and has made the name of the statesman famous, he looks the latter up in his lodgings intending to insist, as he frequently had done in the past, that this masquerade cease, and finds him dead in his rooms. Here he faces a terrible predicament. He feels that he cannot continue to represent himself as the husband of the deceased's wife, and that now, since the statesman is dead, he cannot