The tendency for a foreign body, whether hard like forceps, or soft like gauze pads, to erode its way into the intestine is very remarkable. Thus Gifford operated on a patient with intestinal obstruction; an impacted mass was felt in the ileum, it was extracted through an incision in the gut and proved to be a pad of cotton-wool enveloped in gauze. She recovered. Three months previously this woman had undergone abdominal myomectomy. Another source of risk to patients is the practice or habit of packing the pelvic recesses with strips of gauze temporarily, either with the hope of controlling oozing, or to serve as a drain. I have long abandoned this habit. The disadvantage of gauze stuffing which needs consideration in this section is the risk that some portion, or the whole of it, is sometimes left in the wound. Examples are known where long strips of ‘gauze stuffing’, sometimes amounting to a yard or more, have been passed through the anus a year after the operation. Many intractable sinuses have had a forgotten piece of gauze as the cause of their persistence. A woman had cœliotomy performed for peritonitis, the consequence of criminal abortion; she had a long convalescence due to an intractable sinus. Eventually the patient was thought to have tuberculous disease of the appendages, and a mass, formed mainly by the Fallopian tube, was removed. The walls of the tube were intact, but when slit open the tube was found to contain a small gauze tampon (Kouwer). The isolated records relating to foreign bodies left in the abdomen are very numerous. Thus Wilson in 1884 was able to collect twenty-eight cases from periodical literature and personal reports from friends. An interesting discussion took place on the reading of a paper on this subject before an American gynæcological society, by R. W. Waldo, and the number of cases related by the members is astonishing and refer to such things as sponges, dabs, forceps, a strip of iodoform gauze ‘a yard wide and two yards long’, a pair of spectacles, and ‘an operating-room towel’, which were left in the abdominal cavity. The most comprehensive collection of records relating to foreign bodies left in wounds of all kinds has been made by F. von Neugebauer; they amount to 195. REFERENCES GIFFORD, G. T. _British Medical Journal_, 1907, ii. 1042. KOUWER, PROF. _Zentralbl. für Gynäk._, 1907, xxxi. 1447. MACLAREN, A. _Annals of Surgery_, 1896, xxiv. 365. NEUGEBAUER, F. V. _Monatsschriften für Geburtsh. u. Gyn._, 1900, Bd. xi, 821, 933. _Zentralbl. für Gynäk._, 1904, xxviii. 65. STEWART, J. E. F. _Australian Medical Gazette_, 1906, xxv. 446. WALDO, R. W. _American Journal of Obstetrics_, 1906, liv. 553. WILSON, H. P. C. _Trans. American Gynecological Society_, 1884, ix. 94.