Robert T. Morris

Two Appendices in One Person

To the Editor: —InThe Journal, January 21, Dr. W. G. Young writes of a case in which he found two appendices in one individual, each appendix being well-defined and well-developed. Some years ago a patient was brought to me for operation for adhesions following an appendicitis operation. On opening the abdomen, I found an appendix about three inches long, containing two hard concretions, much to the surprise of another physician present, who stated that the year before he had stood by while the same patient was operated on in an acute attack, and had seen an appendix with three concretions removed. My explanation at the time was that probably the patient possessed an appendix six inches long originally, and the first operator had removed three inches with three concretions, the rest having escaped observation in the midst of acute inflammatory products. I do not know whether this was really

Treatment of Rhus Poisoning

To the Editor: —For many years I have known of a certain cure for poisoning from ivy and various species of rhus. This cure could be described briefly as the last thing that was put on. It was very much like the cures for vomiting of pregnancy. The last thing employed in any given case was a specific. For something over forty years I have suffered from ivy poisoning, on an average, more than once a year. As a fisherman, hunter and horticulturist, no degree of caution sufficed to allow of my escape from ivy poisoning for an entire season when in America.

A REPORT OF EXPERIMENTS GERMANE TO THE SUBJECT OF ABDOMINAL SUPPORTERS AFTER LAPAROTOMY.: Read before the Section of Gynecology, at the Forty-third Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association, held in Detroit, Mich., June 10, 1892.

Rabbits were used for the experiments because it did not happen to be convenient for me to use larger animals, although the latter would have been better. An incision about an inch and a half in length was made in the middle abdominal line in a series of adult rabbits and then the wounds were closed with catgut in two tiers. The first tier included peritoneum, muscle and fibrous tissues. The second tier united skin margins. The method of examining the character of repaired tissues afterwards consisted in dividing up the abdominal walls into half inch wide strips, cut transversely, the rabbits having been killed with chloroform. The strips were then dissected in such a way that skin was separated from muscles and muscles from peritoneum. The strips of separate tissues were tossed into a beaker of water to prevent drying while tests were being made to determine the strength

WHAT DRESSING SHALL LIE NEXT THE WOUND?: Read in the Section of Surgery and Anatomy, at the Fortieth Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association, June, 1889.

The combination of vaseline or oil spread upon any textile fabric represents the worst type of surgical dressing, because the unguent mingles with exuded lymph and retards organization of the latter; because the textile fabric entangles new epithelium cells and connective tissue cells; and because the moist condition of such dressing favors the development of troublesome micrococci. (Lint and cotton are even worse than textile fabrics.) The cerates spread upon textile fabrics are one point better, because new epithelium cells are not entangled in the mass, but such dresssings must not be employed nowadays. Balsams spread upon textile fabrics or upon lint or oakum have a very limited field of usefulness. The dressing composed of the above mentioned elements is fairly antiseptic, but it does not avoid the danger of entanglement of new epithelium and connective tissue cells in a wound which is undergoing repair. There are only two types