Editorial note — THE CHURCH AND SURGERY DURING THE MIDDLE AGES.

[Footnote 26: As showing how professional jealously may exist in such ways in the modern times as to hinder progress, the following paragraph, which is the opening portion of Professor Allbutt's address, has seemed to me to deserve quotation here. It will illustrate a phase of the subject that is probably utterly unexpected by those unfamiliar with the inner history of medicine in our time, but which is not so surprising to physicians who know the jealousy with which men guard their specialties from what they consider the interference of others, in hospital work and in teaching, though this exclusiveness often proves detrimental both to the breadth of development of the student and to the good health of the patient. "It was, I think, in the year 1864, when I was a novice on the Honorary Staff of the Leeds General Infirmary, that the unsurgical division of us was summoned in great solemnity to discuss a method of administration of drugs by means of a needle. This method having obtained some vogue, it behooved those who practiced 'pure' medicine to decide whether the operation were consistent with the traditions of purity. For my part, I answered that the method had come up early, if not originally, in St. George's Hospital, and in the hands of a house physician--Dr. C. Hunter; that I had accustomed myself already to the practice and proposed to continue it; moreover, that I had recently come from the classes of Professor Trousseau, who, when his cases demanded such treatment, did not hesitate himself to perform paracentesis of the pleura, or even incision of this sac, or of the pericardium. As, for lack not of will but of skill and nerve, I did not intend myself to perform even minor operations, my heresy, as one in thought only, was indulgently ignored, and we were set free to manipulate the drug needle if we felt disposed to this humble service."]