1144

a rough computation 20 per cent. of the loss toindustry in sickness is due each year to the commoncold, which many believe to be largely preventableby more careful attention to ventilation and properworking temperature. _

AVERTIN.

SOMEWHAT conflicting reports come from Germanyregarding the recently introduced narcotic, avertin 1(E 107, tribromethylalcohol). Some surgeons find thatthe anaesthesia it produces is as efficient as any thatthey know, besides being more pleasant, whilst othersdeclare that the dangers of avertin put it out of courtas a means of anaesthesia in practice. Experience isnot yet very wide-some 3000 cases form the largestseries yet reported-but it is probable that a definitegenerally held opinion will eventually be forthcomingas to the advisability of adding avertin to the com-monly used anaesthetics. British anaesthetists wouldnaturally like to play a part in the formation of thisopinion by investigations of their own, and we are gladto know that through the zeal of Dr. Fritz Eichholzand the good offices of Dr. H. H. Dale, a certainamount of avertin is likely to be available in the nearfuture for a limited number of clinical trials in thiscountry. It is obvious enough from what has alreadybeen done that the solution of avertin requires of theanaesthetist special care in its preparation and testingshortly before use, and that the risks associated withall forms of rectal anaesthesia are certainly no less,even if they are no greater, with avertin than they arewith ether.

____

WATER DIVINING.

Prof. J. W. Gregory, the well-known geologist, ina paper read on Nov. 17th at the Public Works, Roads,and Transport Congress, gave an historical account ofthe alleged art of water divining with descriptions andsummaries of critical tests to which the method hasbeen subjected. The use of the divining rod goes backto ancient times, and even to-day public bodies employ Idiviners to recommend sites for well-sinking. Somesupporters claim that the rod responds to externalphysical influence, and the diviner himself usuallydenies exerting any muscular force when the rod isstrongly moved. That such a widespread and powerfulinfluence should exist and be incapable of otherexperimental demonstration is difficult to reconcilewith scientific knowledge, and all the movements ofthe rod can be produced by anyone who cares to learnhow to hold it. An alternative view admits the partplayed by muscular action, but retains a claim for the emysterious by postulating a kind of second sight, bywhich the diviner senses the presence of any objectfor which he is searching, such as oil, metals, buriedtreasure, letters in an envelope, future events,underground water, or some special person. Thisfrankly places the divining rod in the same categoryas planchette and other spiritualist mechanisms. Athird explanation brings such mechanisms intorelation with other phenomena that have alreadybeen investigated by medical psychologists. Thetheory of dissociation of consciousness, which conformsto the scientific canons in so far as it usefully sum-marises many happenings and does not clash withanything in the general body of human knowledge, I;allows us to regard the water diviner as possessedof information and- powers of deduction which heunwittingly applies in producing movements of therod, just as the hysteric will, under the influence ofmotives not fully conscious, produce muscular move-ments or paralyses which he declares to be independentof volition. Whilst it does not involve the accusationof conscious fraud, this explanation denies to thediviner any knowledge that he could not attain bythe exercise of his ordinary senses. Prof. Gregorydescribes many tests in which such knowledge failedto manifest itself. It is freely admitted that water isoften found by sinking where the rod has given

1 THE LANCET, 1927, i., 718, 1037, and 1266.

indications of its presence, but for obvious reasonsnegative findings are rarely tested, and he givesexamples where only the hits were counted. Thediviner is often ludicrously astray when he is testedover areas where the distribution of water is accuratelyknown. Diviners who claimed to detect undergroundoil were tested at the research station of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and their results accorded withrather unlucky guesswork. Prof. Gregory fears thatit may seem disrespectful to those who believe in thedivining rod to compare it with such an obsoletehabit as witch-hunting, but he remarks that thehuman mind in all people and amongst all ages hasmany features in common and is greatly influenced bycoincidences and unexplained phenomena. If waterdivining really has such close affinities with witchcraftand fetish as he believes the widespread trust in themethod is rather disconcerting in a scientific age.

PROF. PIRQUET’S VISIT.THE visit to London of Clemens Freiherr von Pirquet

has given the medical profession an opportunity ofattaching more personal characteristics to the eponymof a tuberculin reaction and the originator of a world-wide system of dieting children. There are some,apparently, who are unaware of an intervening periodin Dr. Pirquet’s career, when he occupied the chairof pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University and infusedan element of freshness into child study in America.Dr. Pirquet (as he prefers to be called) has recentlybeen elected president of the " Save the Children "International Union at Geneva, and in this capacityhe addressed, while in London, a large gathering ofsupporters of this Fund. He gracefully acknowledgedthe help given by this country to the children ofVienna during the famine years, and attributeddirectly to this foreign help the fact that Viennaitself is now doing more for its children than everbefore. Timely help in the crisis of their infancy hasbrought the children back to an almost normal stateof health. Rickets, then extraordinarily prevalentin Austria, seems likely to disappear there entirelywithin the next few years, and Dr. Pirquet is optimistenough to believe that the same may be true oftuberculosis in a quarter of a century. Summerdiarrhoea among children, he said, was also dis-appearing in many countries; only in France isthe disease still rife, not because the French holdchild-life in any less esteem than we do, but becauseof the prevailing custom to send the children intothe country during the summer, where they drinkunsupervised milk. He put in a plea for regardingthe common cold as highly infectious to infants,many of whom, he thought, died from pneumoniaarising from a simple cold in the head. His finalremark, that possibly not more than 2 per cent. ofinfantile deaths are unpreventable, was coupledwith the practical suggestion to concentrate on districtswhere a specially high mortality is recorded.

TREATMENT OF HICCUP WITH CARBONDIOXIDE.

IN a recent paper 1 Dr. R. F. Sheldon discusses thetreatment of hiccup by the inhalation of carbondioxide. Hiccup is a spasmodic contraction of thediaphragm, and its cause is probably abnormalstimulation of the respiratory centre, either directlyor through afferent fibres in the phrenic nerve. Thestimulus to the centre which produces normalbreathing is an increase in the tension of carbondioxide in the blood, and 5 per cent. of CO2 in theinspired air is more effective than anything else forincreasing the depth and strength of respiration. Withthis maximal stimulus it is reasonable to suppose thatabnormal or lesser stimuli causing hiccup will beineffective, and that respiration will be uninterrupted.In administering CO2 for this purpose Dr. Sheldonused the Henderson-Coburn machine in hospital and

1 Jour. Amer. Med. Assoc., Oct. 1st, p. 1118.