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927 stomach and poor efficiency. The speaker referred to the greater vitality of white people, the result of their higher protein consumption. Dr. WILSON pointed out that ordinary bean curd, which is an important item of Chinese dietary and regarded as akin to cheese, has 86 per cent. water and 14 per cent. solids (which contain 21 per cent. fat, 60 per cent. protein, and 6 per cent. ash) as against our European cheese, which has 38 per cent. water and 62 per cent. solids. In many schools he found scarcely any protein or fat given, the diet consisting mainly of a little cabbage, white Chinese bread, white rice, and some salt and radishes. At the next session Dr. Wu LIEN TEH gave an address on the Latest Phase of the Narcotic Problem, in which he showed figures representing the enormous increase of morphine injection in China, brought about by unscrupulous Japanese traders and British and American manufacturers. The amount had increased from 5 tons in 1911,14 tons in 1914, to nearly 28 tons in 1919. Both Edinburgh and London firms of high standing were implicated, as was proved by samples of covers which were shown. The Conference passed a resolution urging that immediate action should be taken for the better control of the production of opium and for the limitation of the manufacture of morphia and other derivatives to a quantity not exceeding that necessary for legitimate medical purposes. The Rise of Scientific illedicine in China. On the last day of the Conference the members with their wives attended a reception in the palace of President Hsu Shihchang. The President addressed them in a speech referring to the great humane work which they had done throughout China, and spoke with emphasis on the progress of Western medicine and the benefit it could bring to the people. This was followed in the evening by a banquet at the Army Medical College, where further complimentary speeches were made. The Chinese Government has shown much apprecia,- tion of the work which is being done, and a new era has been entered in which scientific medicine and surgery are no longer regarded with suspicion and animosity. The founding of the China Medical Board (the Rocke- feller Endowment), Hong-Kong University, Chinanfu, and other medical colleges, has brought about a real awakening. It is a movement which has come to stay, as evidenced by the numbers of Chinese students now entering the medical profession. This Biennial Con- ference has brought to notice the part being played all over China by medical missionaries, British and American, in the cause of medical education. It has also stimulated the delegates to further observation and research in a field which opens boundless opportunities for useful contributions to present-day medicine. MEDICINE AND THE LAW. Sentence on a P1’ofessional bo.tionist. AT the Central Criminal Court recently, Mr. Justice Shearman passed a sentence of ten years’ penal servitude on Devi Dayal Sasun, L.R.C.P. Edin., 1902, a native of India, practising medicine in the East End, for manslaughter. The indictment was for the murder of a woman whose body was found in an archway at night near the prisoner’s house. The case for the prosecution was that the woman had asked Sasun to procure her miscarriage, and that immediately after he had operated on her with that intent, had died from shock in his surgery. In order to conceal the crime he had carried the body to the place where it was found, and called the attention of the police to it, as though he had observed it casually in passing. The evidence of Dr. B. H. Spilsbury was to the effect that the woman died from the shock of the operation as stated above, and that though such an occurrence was rare, he had had experience of five similar cases. For the defence Dr. H. R. Andrews, Mr. Comyns Berkeley, and Dr. J. S. Fairbairn expressed opinions adverse to that of Dr. Spilsbury, to the effect that death from shock in such circumstances was so rare that it must be accounted as out of the question that it should have been caused by the operation in the case before the court. More might have been heard of this view if the con- viction had been one of murder and not of man- slaughter. The latter verdict is not one strictly legal or logical, in that to cause death in the commission of a felony constitutes the crime not of manslaughter but of murder. It is, however, sometimes found, and it gave occasion for the police to go into the prisoner’s record and antecedents, which were of such a character that the question whether in this particular instance his conviction was justified by the scientific evidence must to him, at any rate, have become unimportant. Not only was there another indictment on the file which was not gone into, but the police had found on Sasun’s premises documents which showed, when followed up, that he had procured, or had attempted to procure, abortion in a number of women. It need only be pointed out that a single conviction in one of these cases would have rendered him liable to penal servitude for life, and, as a matter of fact, conviction in all of them, with cumulative sentences averaging ten years in each, would have involved condemnation to penal servitude for 1160 years! A Remarkable ln?,postoi,. At Liverpool Assizes recently Mr. Justice McCardie passed a richly deserved sentence of five years’ penal servitude upon a man named Richard Thomas Cubbin, who for many years and in various places has preyed upon the public with singular effrontery and equally remarkable success. Cubbin was stated to have been the son of a collier and to have worked as such himself, losing a leg by an accident. Since 1895 he had lived much abroad and had practised as a medical man. He is a married man who, having deserted his wife, has gone through the ceremony of marriage with other women in order to rob them. In one instance he persuaded the widow of a medical man who had died at sea that he was her lost husband returned to her after three years’ interval. His past sentences included one of penal servitude for bigamy and another for posing as a medical man and giving certificates of death. In the present instance the sentence was for forgery and giving death certificates, offences committed at Blackpool and Wigan. The epithet remarkable has been applied above to the success of this rascal’s operations, because he was stated at his trial to have obtained posts as an assistant to medical men not only under an assumed name, Sir Alexander Thomas Munro, not in the Medical Register, but under the guise, unusual in such candidates, of a baronet, a "colonel-surgeon," a brigadier-general, and a K.B.E. ; combinations of these titles appearing upon cards used by him. He even exhibited a coronet upon his stationery. This last peculiarity on the part of an alleged baronet may have helped to bring about Cubbin’s undoing, but it is suggested that the other impostures, or any one of them, should have been enough. Medical directories, medical registers, army lists, and books of reference containing the names of baronets, with other particulars about them, are fairly accessible everywhere, and can be consulted without any possibility of hurting the feelings of a genuine candidate for a vacant post. Witnesses Under S1Lbpaena and Expe1’t Evidence. In an action tried recently in the High Court Mr. and Mrs. A. Leuw sued Mr. W. A. Bulleid for damages for an injury occasioned by the drill used by him in pre- paring one of her teeth coming in contact with the fioor of her mouth. Severe haemorrhage took place, and questions arose at the trial, not only with regard to the manner in which the accident was brought about, but also with regard to the subsequent treatment of the wound. In the end Mr. Justice Bailhache awarded damages to the plaintiff, with regard to the question of negligence, on the ground that either the defendant allowed the carborundum wheel to slip, in which case he would be liable, or that, assuming that the patient caused the accident by swallowing while the wheel was being used, the defendant ought to have Warned her not to do so, or requested her to notify him before doing so
