Kidney disease is often extremely insidious. It may develop absolutely without the patient's knowledge, even though he might be deemed to be in a position to have at least some suspicion of its existence. The story is told of more than one professor of medicine who has presented his own urine to his class for examination in order that they might have the opportunity of studying normal urine, only to find to his painful surprise that albumen was present and that he was the subject of latent Bright's disease. In these cases it is {138} impossible to foresee results. They constitute a large number of the cases in which patients, seemingly in good health, succumb rather easily and unexpectedly to some simple disease, like grippe or dysentery. It is well to take the precaution, then, to ask the attending physician what the condition of the kidneys is in such cases. If there are anomalous symptoms, this precaution becomes doubly necessary. Even such simple infectious diseases as mumps or chicken-pox may cause a fatal issue where the kidneys are not in a condition to do their normal work of excretion. An important class of cases for the clergyman are those which are picked up on the street. As a rule, these patients are comatose because of the presence of kidney disease. A certain proportion of them are unconscious because of apoplexy. Very often the patients have had some preliminary symptoms of their approaching collapse, though these were not sufficient to make them think that any serious danger threatened. As a consequence, they will not infrequently have had recourse to some stimulant. It seems unfortunately to be almost a rule, when such cases are picked up, if there is the odour of alcohol on their breath, to consider that the condition is due to alcoholism. Every year, in our large cities, some deaths are reported in the cells of the station houses because a serious illness was mistaken for alcoholism as a result of the odour of the breath. Needless to say, then, the odour of alcohol on the breath of a person in coma should not deter a clergyman from waiting for a time to be sure his ministrations may not be needed for something much more serious than alcoholism.