can make, the number of coaches and passengers it can carry as it jars the earth with its iron tread during the years which are to come, that count.

The nurse's sense of duty like that of the physician is a constant reminder to make her do her best. The once anxious doubt as to the fate or result no longer disturbs the physician's mind and the importance of this cannot be exaggerated, for our only hope in many cases rests in the care which is given the case. The day of memory and thanks at the hands of the medical profession toward the nurses as a class is not somewhere in the future, it has come now, and so we draw a scarlet line below the name of those who have done and are doing so much to help the sick and injured to get well; a line of scarlet below the names of those who have shared our anxiety until the sufferer was relieved. It is safe to assume that in the future history will point out that many of the brilliant results obtained in both medicine and surgery are closely associated with the help given by the nursing profession, their help rendering it possible to point out lines of safety and sources of danger. The people that others see strong and well, full of joy and activity, come under our observation and also the nurse when they are sick in both body and mind. Men in other callings and avocations of life see people only when they are well, when they are ready to have their photographs taken, when they are at their best and when the most generous. But the nurse like the doctor sees people under every disadvantage of disease, sees the strong when they are weak, the beautiful when they are repulsive with sufferings which can be relieved only with care. In our success in modern days with the sick and injured who are entrusted to our care let us not be exalted more than facts will warrant. Let us give credit and praise to those who, in the morning, at noon day, at evening time, at midnight, were anxiously waiting and watching by the bedside where we had great interests at stake.

THE NATIVE NURSE IN INDIA.

ENGLISH nurses have their problems in the colonies as well as their home problems to work out, and it adds great dignity to their professional labors to realize that their influence reaches across many seas and dominates the systems cf an empire. The American people are just waking to the consciousness of new opportunities and a new leadership in our island possessions. In all matters of organization and education we look to our English cousins for models and methods.

In this connection, nurses will read with interest and profit the ietter of Miss Tindall, Lady Superintendent of the Cama and Allbless. Hospitals in Bombay. We quote from the British Journal of Nursing:

As you remark in your note to "H. M. Thacker's" letter n the issue of November 6th, which has just reached me, "the nursing question is a difficult one in India,”— how difficult none but those at the helm in the country can truly gauge. But as the head of a large Training School in India (and one of the most developed on European lines), which caters chiefly for native pupils, I feel constrained to add a word on this knotty question.

I have twenty-five Indian women always in training (and a few Europeans and Eurasians). As many as I have vacancies for, after obtaining their certificate, which includes midwifery, at which they are adepts, I keep on my staff. My only regret is that these posts are few, and I have to part with many excellent native nurses.

I have now launched what I believe to be the first Private Nursing Institute in India, "for supplying Indian nurses to Indian families," and as it is composed of my own graduate nurses, I am enabled to keep some of the best still on my staff when not at cases; they work wherever sent in the hospitals, thus keeping up to date, and up to the standard of surgical cleanliness and careful ways in which they have been trained.

As to having to fall back on such a system of punishment as fines, etc., which obtains in Calcutta (according to "H. M. Thacker"), my nurses would hide their heads in shame at such a suggestion. Since I took over charge here not a single nurse has been reported to me for coming on duty late, and practically the only punishment inflicted is a threat on the part of the Charge Nurse that she will send the delinquent to my office for a scolding, or that she will report her to me.

Although there is co little discipline in the home life of these girls, it is little short of marvellous the way they fall into line, and I make no exaggeration in saying that the discipline in these hospitals now falls but little short of a well-conducted hospital at home.

Some few alterations have been made with the cordial support of the First Physician (English), and I have had no trouble in getting the nurses to co-operate with me, outwardly at any rate, so that any changes. are effected simply by an explanation, a notice on the board, or by the Charge Nurses telling their juniors. I exercise much caution as to choice of my candidates: they come on trial; each one pays a fee for eighteen months, and a good standard of education is essential. Over and beyond this, I do not hesitate, while giving them every opportunity to improve, to weed out any who show real unsuitableness for the work. In fact, the school is conducted on English lines entirely, modified to Indian life, and it is my firm belief and my constant encouragement that we have laid the foundation of an Indian nursing profession fully worthy of recognition by the Mother Country, and that if only more facilities were offered for Indian nurses to train in thousands (instead of a few hundred) in schools somewhat on the lines of this, great attention being paid to thoroughness in every detail, and, as at home during the last sixty years, gradually leading them on to the more advanced studies and practice of the arts of the profession, Indians would have their hospitals staffed by their

own Sisters, and have their sick, whether at home or in hospital, devotedly and skilfully tended by their own thoroughly trained countrywomen.

At present, of course, they need the supervision and example of training by English nurses, but I see no reason whatever why it should not be "India for the Indians" in the matter of nursing, when we have material which certainly needs patient training and teaching, but which at the very outset has some of the essential characteristics necessary for the profession, for they are kind and good to their patients, they are deft with their fingers, and frequently exhibit the greatest devotion.

I have received several spontaneous letters of thanks from the patients of my private nurses, who, of course, are entirely on their own responsibility while at their cases, saying how skilfully and sympathetically they have performed their duties.

Surely this is a very great test, and yet one more proof to me that Indian women of decent education can be trained to become reliable, efficient professional nurses.

PURE FOOD AND HEALTH LAWS.*

Nor a few of our laws are resultants of our complex civilization, which certainly tends toward higher complexity. Among such laws are those which have for their object the protection of the public health and the protection of the food supply against adulteration. Within the memory. of living men, such a thing as food adulteration was unknown. In pioneer days, feeding was simple and more rational than in these times. Then, families sat down to tables which were supplied with pork and beans of home production, to corn bread. apple sauce, chickens raised naturally in woods and fields, to milk and butter produced from non-tuberculous, non-swill fed cows, which stood almost at the kitchen door; doughnuts, hot from the sizzling lard:

*Reprinted from the Bulletin of the Indiana State Board of Health.

pumpkin pies made from pumpkin which had not been coffined for months; hominy made in the very room in which it was eaten, instead of being taken from a can filled in a frame shed somewhere and called a canning factory. And what delicious flavors were attendant upon all of these articles. With what joy did they salute the gustatory nerve, and how gratefully they were received by the stomach.

But these days are not necessarily gone, for even now it is not required to live the canned life. The city cliff dweller finds the canned life handy and convenient, and lives it at the cost of the good health and superior enjoyment which attend simple and more natural nutrition. If he would supply himself with a "fireless-cooker," and in the evening before retiring would start his plain breakfast in it, he would in the morning have food which would give him superior gustatory pleasure, a clear head and abundant energy. Instead of a simple, rational breakfast, our cliffdwellers has embalmed hog, better known as ham and bacon, or highly spiced sausage, or beefsteak from a tuberculous animal or from an animal slaughtered and its meat kept under the most revolting conditions. Eggs, almost always from cold storage, are added, and all is washed down with black coffee. Such a breakfast is not a balanced ration. It makes too much soot and ash and so clogs the furnace grates and the boiler's flues. Clearness of head does not attend, and kidneys and liver suffer from overwork in clearing away the debris. In time, Bright's disease appears, and the victim wonders where it came from. "Why was I selected to have this malady?" he asks. Eat plain, unembalmed foods, cooking them well. Potatoes, rice, hominy, vegetables, fruit, cornmeal, well baked wholewheat flour bread, milk from healthy animals and a clean dairy, fresh eggs or none. What more can one want? Darwin, Spencer, Pasteur, lived entirely upon such food, and they did some good work too. A gentleman of my acquaintance was one time.

a guest of Darwin's on his farm in Kent. For supper, bread and milk was offered; nothing more, and no apology. Darwin's work was certainly worth a million times more to humanity than the work of Harriman. Rich, highly spiced foods, catsup, pickles, fancy cooking, much meat, are all hard on kidneys and livers.

Excessive use of salt is injurious. The blood and the body need only a very little salt. A man weighing 150 pounds contains only a little over one ounce. We all eat a great deal more salt than is for our good. Certain forms of stomach troubles are caused by excessive salt eating. If your stomach hurts, try cutting out salt, salads, pickles, catsups and meats and chew your plain foods extra well. You will find this treatment has the pepsin and drug treatment skinned a mile. Well, the whole lesson is pure food laws are needed principally because we will not eat rationally. It is the same with health laws. We need health laws because we refuse to live according to the natural laws of our wellbeing. We have consumption, because we spit, because we just will not thoroughly ventilate our school rooms, our bedrooms. our offices, our churches and our public halls. We ride in closed trolley cars and breathe the fetid air which has already been down into the lungs of others, we heave in alcohol and meats and spices, and fray our nerves with caffein. Old Solomon said "Be ye not among wine bibbers, among riotous eaters of flesh.

We have typhoid fever, and spend enough on it annually to present every member of the legislature and each doorkeeper with a red automobile, just becaus we will not dispose of human and anima manure in a sanitary way. Sir Frederic Treves, King Edward's physician, who ha grown rich and great off disease, has said "When simplicity and frugality of living is achieved, voluntary celibacy will becom discreditable, and the premature deaths o the breadwinners will disappear before san ified cities and vanishing intemperance."

TECHNICALITIES.

Items of value to nurses in their work will be welcome to this column.

DENATURED ALCOHOL.-Denatured alcohol is alcohol to which has been added certain materials which destroy its character as a beverage and render it unfit for liquid medicinal purposes, but which do not prevent employment for industrial purposes. Denatured alcohol is exempt from the internal revenue tax laid on ordinary alcohol, and is sometimes called taxfree alcohol. Under authority of an act of Congress passed in 1907, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue has prescribed that for general purposes alcohol known as completely denatured alcohol must be prepared by either of the following formulas:

1. To every 100 gallons ethyl alcohol (of not less than 180 degrees proof) there shall be added 10 gallons of approved methyl alcohol, and onehalf gallon of approved benzin.

2. To every 100 gallons of ethyl alcohol (of not less than 180 degrees proof) there shall be added two gallons of approved methyl alcohol, and one-half gallon of approved pyridin bases.

The methyl alcohol, benzin, and pyridin intended for use as denaturants must be submitted for chemical test and must conform to certain specifications. In cases in which the above named substances would render the alcohol unfit for certain industrial uses special denaturants have been authorized.

Tax-free alcohol can be economically used as a fuel or for power in place of gasoline and is used mechanically as a solvent, etc., in various trades. In manufacturing, alcohol is employed in the production of a number of extensively used chemicals, such as ether, chloroform, acetic ether, etc. It finds extensive application in the manufacture of varnishes, photographic dry plates, embalming fluid, lacquers, pastes and varnishes from soluble cotton, thermometer and barometer tubes, celluloid, transparent soap, photo-engravings, fulminate of mercury, watches, purified rubber, imitation leather, and for many other purposes.Journal of Am. Medical Association.

GLYCERINE DISINFECTION OF RUBBER GLOVES AND SILK CATHETERS.-Dr. Heusner has found that rubber gloves can be boiled in glycerine as long and as frequently as desired. He has the disinfector made with an outer and inner chamber between the walls of which is a wire netting. The gloves are placed in a closed wire-netting box in the bottom of the disinfector to keep them covered with the glycerine. The double walls and

wire netting act like a safety lamp, allowing the penetration of the heat without danger of overheating. Numerous tests showed that the gloves were always sterile heating to 110 or 115 C. for thirty minutes in this apparatus, over a gas stove or alcohol lamp. Not a trace of injury or change was seen in any of the gloves, silk catheters, and instruments thus sterilized. The only objection is the expense of the glycerine, but the same glycerine can be used repeatedly.-British Journal of Nursing.

BATH TEMPERATURES. The temperatures of baths is usually calculated as follows: Cold, 33 degrees Fahr. to 65 degrees Fahr.; Tepid, 85 degrees Fahr. to 92 degrees Fahr; Warm, from 92 degrees Fahr, to 98 degrees Fahr.; Hot, from 98 degrees Fahr, to 105 degrees Fahr.-British Journal of Nursing.

THE CARE OF INDIA-RUBBER ARTICLES.-All india-rubber articles should as a general rule be kept in a cool, dark, airy, dry place. Sunlight and heat are to be avoided. Articles stored in boxes and drawers should be taken out and well aired at least once a month. Tubes should never be hung up, but should be kept lying loosely in a drawer or box. Patent india-rubber goods should be kept specially well aired. If not in use, rinse them in water once in three months and, after drying, rub in with the hand one or two drops of glycerine. Rings and straps should be aired and moved about frequently otherwise they lose their elasticity. Air-cushions should not be piled one on another, nor folded or bent.-Nursing Times.

SUN-BATHS DANGEROUS.-Under the heading of German Science, the Westminster Gazette reports the following interesting opinion: Prof. Grawitz, of Charlottenburg, warns against the present craze for sun-baths, which he declares often have very injurious results. Although light treatment may prove beneficial for particular ailments, there is no evidence whatever to show that it is beneficial upon the whole organism. Polar expeditions and other experiences prove that the absence of sunlight for whole months causes no harm to the organism; and for thousands of years civilized man has been accustomed to exclude all light from the greater part of the body. When the unaccustomed body is exposed to strong sunlight bad results often ensue. Inflammation of the skin is only a minor evil, but light baths affect the heart injuriously in more than one way, and sometimes cause collapse. The temperature is unduly raised; headaches are suffered from, and there results a general excitation of the nervous system.-British Journal of Nursing.

BRACE BANDAGE FOR THE CHEST OR BACK.-The following will be found a very useful way of keeping in place a dressing on the chest or back of a convalescent patient.

Take two separate yards of white webbing an inch broad, sew them together for a length of eight inches. Then double the sewn portion back on itself obliquely so as to form a four-inch loop. The loop is placed at the back of the patient, one strap passing over each shoulder. A roller bandage is then applied, the first turn passing through the loop at the back, and each turn over the straps in front. The ends of the straps are then turned back and pinned on to themselves.

This is particularly convenient for a patient who has his dressing done after he has got up, as it does not necessitate tripping to the waist. Less bandage is also used, and it is therefore cooler. Webbing will be found to be much more comfortable than calico or silk.-Nursing Times.

CANCER.-The council of the British Medical Association at its meeting in 1909 approved the following appeal to doctors, midwives and nurses:

Cancer of the womb is a very common and fatal disease in women, but it can be cured by operation when it is recognized early. A woman sometimes tells a nurse or midwife her ailments before she speaks to a doctor, and the nurse or midwife has then an opportunity of aiding our crusade against this terrible disease.

Cancer may occur at any age, and in a woman who looks quite well and who may have no pain, no wasting, no foul discharge, and no profuse bleeding.

To wait for pain, wasting, foui discharge, or profuse bleeding is to throw away the chance of successful treatment.

The early signs of cancer of the womb are: 1. Bleeding, which occurs after the change of life.

2. Bleeding after sexual intercourse, or after a vaginal douche.

3. Bleeding, slight or abundant, even in young women, if occurring between the usual monthly periods, and especially when accompanied by a bad-smelling or watery blood-tinged discharge.

4. Thin, watery discharge occurring at any age. The nurse or midwife who is told by a patient that she has any of these symptoms should insist upon her seeing a medical practitioner in order that an examination may be made without delay. By doing so she will often help to save a valuable

life, and will bring credit to herself and to her calling. The News Letter.

LOCK UP THE KNIFE!-The death of an inmate of the Angleton Asylum, Brigend, through cutting her throat, though it in no way reflects upon the nursing staff, shows yet again the need for very stringent precautions in relation to all and every mental patient, no matter how slight the ground for suspicion of her dementia may be. The patient in question was sufficiently well to assist in institutional housework, and was at the time engaged in lighting a fire; the nurse on duty left the room for three minutes, during which time the woman procured a knife from a tabledrawer near at hand, and did herself injuries to which she subsequently succumbed. The need for having knives, etc., locked up was clearly emphasized by the coroner, who recalled the head nurse to advise that locks should in future be fitted to the drawers.-Nursing Times.

ANAESTHETICS.-Sir Francis Cruise, M.D., in a letter addressed to the press warns the public that anææsthetics, the greatest boon of modern times to suffering humanity, are not free from danger to life, and that the fatal cases almost always occur with chloroform. As no one can tell the day he may need an anesthetic, all should be adequately informed. Roughly speaking, he states, that fatalities with chloroform amount to 1 in 3,000 administrations; with ether I in 17,000. Choloroform is often preferred, as more agreeable to the patient, less likely to be followed by nausea and vomiting, and as simpler for the anesthetist, but Sir Francis Cruise holds that such reasons are not sufficient to counterbalance its much greater danger to life. Some hearts are especially sensitive to chloroform, and yet give no previous indication or warning. When administered an apparatus which secures a definite low percentage of chloroform vapor in the air should always be used.-British Journal of Nursing.