patient lived after being subjected to the treatment he recommends,
it is safe to say that he was dealing with an artificial collapse--a
drug collapse--and he did not have perforation and diffuse
peritonitis.

This statement of the eminent Philadelphia surgeon adds another very
weighty proof to my oft-repeated assertion that it matters not how
eminent the medical man may be, he cannot tell the difference
between drug and pathological symptoms. Of course this is a
humiliating statement, and it is not expected that those very
eminent medical men whom I charge with inability to differentiate
between drug collapse and the collapse due to disease, will
acknowledge that I am right, for, if their mental horizons extended
far enough for them to admit it, it would not be necessary for me to
say it.

In no other way can the atrocious mistakes that doctors make in
prognosis be accounted for. _How many, many times _doctors have
declared that a given case must end in death, and they are so
cocksure that they are right that they leave the patient to die;
some sort of a fake, mountebank or fanatic comes in, the drug
disease wears off and in a few days the patient is well. That is
exactly the sort of a case Dr. Deaver describes. The faker gets busy
with drugs that antidote the morphine poisoning, and occasionally a
patient gets well in spite of all.

In regard to surgery for this disease I shall quote from Ochsner:

"Personally, I can only second the statement made by one of the most
experienced men in this country in the surgical treatment of