[Illustration: DR. RADCLIFFE'S CANE.] The College of Physicians possesses at the present time the gold cane which Radcliffe, Mead, Askew, Pitcairn, and Baillie successively carried about with them, and which Mrs. Baillie presented to that learned body. The drawing here given is a representation of this cane, and it will be seen that it has not a gold knob, but consists of an engraved handle or crook. It is, I think, quite clear that the custom which the doctors of the last century always followed in carrying their stick about with them, even to the bed-side, was due entirely to the fact that the handle of the cane could be, and was, filled with strong smelling disinfectants, such as rosemary and camphor. The doctor held this against his nose obviously for two reasons. One, to destroy any poison which might be floating about in the air but chiefly to prevent him smelling unpleasant odours. This stick was as long as a footman's, smooth and varnished. A belief in the protective power of camphor and other pleasant-smelling herbs is still in existence, and we know quite a number of individuals who carry about with them bags of camphor during the prevalence of an epidemic. Before Howard exposed the deadly sanitary state of the prisons of this country, it was the custom to sprinkle aromatic herbs before the prisoners, so powerful was the noxious effluvium which exhaled from their filthy bodies. The bouquet which the chaplain always carried when accompanying a prisoner to Tyburn, was used for the same defensive purpose. The stick of the physician's cane was probably a relic of the legerdemain of the healer, who in superstitious times worked upon the ignorance of the credulous. The modern conjuror always uses a wand in his entertainment. These baubles die hard, because there is a strong conservative instinct in the race which clings with tremendous tenacity to anything which has the sanction of antiquity. The barber's pole is still seen even in London, and is striped blue and white, emblems of the phlebotomist, and symbolical of the blue venous blood, which was so ungrudgingly given by the sufferers from almost all maladies. The white stripe represented the bandage used to bind up the wound on the arm. The practice of the bleeders continued in fashion in England until the beginning of this century. John Coutsley Lettsom, who possessed high literary attainments, and who was President of the Philosophical Society of London, and who entertained at his house at Grove Hill, Camberwell, many of the most distinguished men of his time, including Boswell and Dr. Johnson, and whose writings shew he was an enlightened physician, was bold in his treatment of disease, and a heroic bleeder. He used to say of himself:-- "When patients sick to me apply, I physics, bleeds, and sweats 'em Then if they choose to die, What's that to me--I lets 'em."