The writer, in the nearly fifty years of his practice as student and graduate, has had an average share, perhaps, of his patients die; but he has never had one die of any sort of fever after he had been bled as an aid in subduing that fever. On the other side, he has had patients die of the acute inflammatory diseases when they have not been bled; and, to-night, recalling those cases, he is of the opinion that some of them, if they had been well tapped in the arm at the outset of the sickness, they would have been saved. ROCKY HILL, CONN., December, 1897. TAKA-DIASTASE IN THE TREATMENT OF AMYLACEOUS DYSPEPSIA. BY WALTER P. ELLIS, M. D. Pepsina porci, the pepsin of the hog, was one among the first of the animal products to be used in medicine, and many physicians, not well versed in organic chemistry, supposed that in it they possessed a sovereign remedy for indigestion in all its forms and stages, and the confirmed dyspeptic had only to apply the specific to have his digestive apparatus restored to its youthful health and vigor. Unfortunately for this view and for the sufferers, the fact was overlooked, or not duly appreciated, that pepsin is only one of several substances which Nature employs in the complete digestion of food, and that the products or secretions of several different glands have a part in the process, each of which is essential to the proper preparation of food for the nourishment of the human body. It has been estimated by competent observers that as great a proportion as seventy-five per cent of all the intractable cases of dyspepsia in this country are caused primarily by faulty saccharification of the starchy foods which constitute such a large portion of the diet of the American people. This being the fact, is it any wonder that the administration of pepsin alone should fail to give relief in many cases? It fails because the fault lies, not in the stomach, but in the salivary and other glands whose secretions possess the amylolytic property, and the remedy is the administration of substances that will restore that property to the secretions, or which possess it in and of themselves.