The _Medical Pioneer_ of January, 1896, contained a very interesting article by Dr. J. H. Kellogg upon "The Influence of Alcohol upon Urinary Toxicity, and its Relation to the Medical Use of Alcohol." He gives the results of many of his own experiments to determine the effects of alcohol in hindering the elimination of poisonous matter by the kidneys. The subject of one experiment was a healthy man of 30 years, weighing 66 kilos. For fifty days prior to the experiment he had taken a carefully regulated diet, and the urotoxic coefficient had remained very nearly uniform. The urine carefully collected for the first eight hours after the administration of 8 ounces of brandy diluted with water, showed an enormous diminution in the urotoxic coefficient, which was, in fact, scarcely more than half the normal coefficient for the individual in question. The urine collected for the second period of eight hours showed an increase of toxicity, and that for the third period of eight hours showed still further increase of toxicity, the coefficient having nearly returned to its normal standard. Of this Dr. Kellogg says:-- "The bearing of this experiment upon the use of alcohol in pneumonia, typhoid fever, erysipelas, cholera and other infectious diseases, will be clearly seen. In all the maladies named, and in nearly all other infectious diseases, which include the greater number of acute maladies, the symptoms which give the patient the greatest inconvenience, and those which have a fatal termination, when such is the result, are directly attributable to the influence of the toxic substances generated within the system of the patient as the result of the specific microbes to which the disease owes its origin. The activity of the liver in destroying these poisons, and of the kidneys in eliminating them, are the physiologic processes which stand between the patient and death. In a very grave case of infectious disease, without this destructive and eliminative activity the accumulation of poison within the system would quickly reach a fatal point. The symptoms of the patient vary for better or worse in relation to the augmentation or diminution of the quantity of toxic substances within the body.