While you are thinking about the Ontario Medical Association, begin to think as well that you have a personal interest in Canada's national, medical organization, the Canadian Medical Association and that the Canadian Medical Association has a great interest in you. There is going to be a great meeting, and a good meeting, at Halifax this year from the 22nd to the 25th of August. If you do not attend these meetings you are missing the annual event of importance in the medical life of your country. The register proves that there are a great many medical men of Canada who attend these meetings regularly year in and year out, and scarcely ever miss a meeting. The annual meeting of that lusty and thriving child of the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Medical Protective Association, takes place during the progress of the meetings of the former. You either have, or you ought to have, a keen interest in that event. If you are not a member refer to our announcement opposite the editoral page, and you will get full information. We urge you to become a member without delay.

Dr. Charles O'Reilly has handed in his resignation of the office of Medical Superintendent of the Toronto General Hospital. The severance of his connection with an institution over which he has presided so splendidly for over twenty-nine years, is an event of importance. He was by far the most capable hospital administrator in Canada, and has been instrumental in developing the General, which is the largest hospital in the Dominion. Dr. O'Reilly knew well how to run a hospital. Affable, genial, popular with the members of the staff, diplomatic-he combined such good gifts— that the Board of Directors will experience difficulty in filling his position so satisfactorily as he has done it. It will take years to accustom oneself to the General without the presence of "Charley" superintending. All will wish him a happy holiday abroad.

It was the custom of former Governments of the Province of Ontario to appoint asylum superintendents and assistant physicians from the political hustings; so we sincerely hope that it is not going to be the practice of the present administration, because it is a very unjust and indefensible practice. What does a doctor,

who is a politician, know about the treatment of the insane, those most unfortunate of individuals, who should have the best care and attention that medical knowledge can give them? Yet it has been the invariable, but wrongful policy, to pick out from the political caucus a physician who has been busy on the side lines. during election times. It is to be hoped that the practice will cease under new auspices, and that inducements will be extended to medical men to specially qualify themselves for such important practice; and that when vacancies occur they will be filled with due regard to the medical qualifications and not to the political qualifications of the candidate. There should be adopted a system of promotion, as a man who has spent several years in asylum practice, must plainly be better, yes, far better, qualified to do that. work than he who comes from the party caucus.

Five hundred deaths in Ontario during the first quarter of the present year from tuberculosis, a preventable disease, is indeed, alarming, and would lead one to think that the medical profession has not seized hold of the essentials of treatment in this disease. It would as well lead one to think that in many of these cases there is regrettable delay in making a diagnosis, probably in many cases, because the patient does not present himself or herself for treatment: until irreparable damage has been done. Those who would prevent disease must get down to first principles.

It will take a generation

to arrive at any distinct advance; for the proper place to educate is the public school. If that plan were adopted and followed out,. to teach elementary sanitary science, just as arithmetic, reading. and grammar are taught, results would accrue.

Cerebrospinal fever, cerebro-spinal meningitis, a disease which has caused over 1,000 lives in New York City since the beginning of 1905, is claiming the attention of the medical world. Dr. J. C. Wilson, of Philadelphia, gives in the 29th of March issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, in a very interesting and valuable paper, these symptoms in the ordinary forms. No.

other acute disease appears in such various disguises; and Stille has well called it a "chameleon-like disorder." There are headache, dragging muscular pains, vertigo and a sense of fatigue, chill, nausea and vomiting. The patient often acts like a drunken man. Then there are dragging pains in the neck, spread along the spine, into the extremities, soon followed by motor symptoms, such as great pain on attempting to move the head, stiffness of the spinal muscles. A common symptom is strabismus, inequality of the pupils and palsies of the facial muscles. Then opisthotonous develops, the head being drawn back and the spine curved, with the forearms flexed on the arms and the legs on the thighs. Coming and going there are muscular cramps, and in young children convulsions. The pulse is also irregular. Fever may be slight or absent, while again it reaches 105° to 106°. Lesions of the skin are quite common, hence the name spotted fever-and they are polymorphous. Dr. Wilson says this of Kernig's sign: "The phenomenon described by Kernig in 1884, and known as Kernig's sign, is found to be present in eighty to ninety per cent. of the cases of meningitis, and only exceptionally present in other cases. This test is often attended by evident pain on the part of the patient. Kernig's sign is not available in cases of rheumatic or other forms of arthritis of the knee or hip, myositis, contractions from nervous disease and sciatica.”

An idea has originated in Philadelphia, a sanitary reform, which may promise much, namely, the delivery of milk in paper bottles. Everyone is interested in a pure milk delivery; and the idea of delivering milk in receptacles which may at once be destroyed as soon as their contents are used, will go much towards promoting this end. Dr. A. H. Stewart, city bacteriologist of Philadelphia, has conducted a series of tests, and reports favorably upon paper bottles, which are to be manufactured out of heavy paper or pasteboard made from spruce pulp. A manufactory has already been established in Pittsburg, which in a few months will have ten machines manufacturing 20,000 of these bottles per day. They are stamped out of three-ply paper, given a conical shape to facilitate packing, have bottoms of a double thickness, and two

pounds of milk may be placed in each without crushing. The over-lapping edges are glued and the interior is coated with fine paraffine. They are sterilized by exposure to a temperature of 212°. The bottles will be manufactured at less than a cent apiece.

The Hon. Mr. Hanna, the Provincial Secretary of Ontario has, so he states, not lost sight of the fact that it would be in the interests of the Toronto Provincial Hospital for Mental Diseases, if that institution were established outside the city in a rural district. In this the medical profession will concur; and as the City of Toronto is extending its business centre day by day to the westward, the site of the present buildings would make valuable lots for homes for the working classes. The honorable minister might well consider the advisability of changing the name of asylum, as attached to these institutions, and of appointing outside staffs, same as are attached to hospitals. There is no doubt that there is a great deal of insanity that could be prevented; and giving the profession and the medical student body better facilities for clinical study of mental diseases, as seen in a hospital of this character, would be a step in the right direction.

Editorial Notes.

Jiu-jitsu is a complicated system of trick wrestling evolved by the Japanese after centuries of trial and practice by the ruling classes. It depends upon an intimate anatomic knowledge of the joints and peripheral nerves. The wrestler tries to seize his opponent in such way that he can twist a joint, say the shoulder, so as to give great pain. American school boys have a trick of seizing another's index finger and bending it back until pain causes the sufferer to cry for mercy, and this is typical of jiu-jitsu. It is combined with such tricks as pressing upon exposed nerves or tender spots in joints such as under the lobe of the ear, while holding the opponent in a species of chancery, or an effort may be made to choke the opponent. As soon as the antagonist relaxes his guard in a moment of pain, the other slips behind him, and while back to back, throws him over his head by a dextrous movement. While still stunned, the fallen man is seized, bound, handcuffed, or in the olden times dispatched with the sword. The system was carefully taught to all the samurai or ruling caste, but the mass of the people were kept in ignorance of its tricks. At present it is apparently used by only the police, to assist them in overpowering men much larger than themselves. American Medicine.

Jiu-jitsu is advocated as a system of calisthenics, and there is at present a tendency to introduce it from this standpoint, but its dangers are so great that it would be wise for the medical profession to frown upon it. Only Japanese joints and bones can withstand such usage, and we can rest assured that if the present tendency succeeds, physicians will meet with a series of cases of twisted, sprained and permanently damaged joints and traumatic neuritis. Already there are reports of fatalities from the violent throws upon the floor, and it would seem to be more dangerous to life than boxing and football. Americans who have witnessed jiu-jitsu bouts in Japan, between native experts in their native costume, or lack of it, know that even with the floor heavily padded with mattresses, the exertion is so violent, and a man can be thrown with such force, that it is only by the greatest skill and agility that the Japs themselves escape serious injury. If one is ruined, the others, with Oriental carelessness of life, do not seem to care particularly. Physicians, therefore, should utter a word of warning whenever the occasion arises against this new fad, and though it is not exactly a yellow peril from the Orient, it bids fair