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1373 Irish Asylum Fanance. Mr. Richard Jones, J.P., chairman of the Richmond Asylum, had an interview at the House of Commons last week with Mr. Masterman, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, and laid before him the facts in connexion with the failure of the Irish Local Taxation Account to discharge its liability for the payment of grants in aid of the main- tenance of lunatics in Irish asylums. It was pointed out that the Local Taxation Account at the present time owed local bodies the sum of E82,000 in respect of the main- tenance of lunatics, and Mr. Jones urged the recoupment of this sum. The circumstances, he said, which led Parliament to make this grant in aid in 1874 existed now in a greatly aggravated measure. In 1869 Mr. Gladstone estimated that the cost of maintaining lunatics in Ireland would ultimately reach £200,000; the actual cost in 1910-11 was .E580.133. In 1870 the proportion of lunatics per 100,000 of population was 189 ; in the year 1910 that figure had increased to 558 per 100,000 of population. The average annual increase in cost had been much greater owing to increase in numbers since the passing of the Irish Local Government Act in 1898 than in the period from 1870 to 1898. Previous to the voting of the grant in aid by Parliament, loans for lunatic asylum purposes were granted out of the Consolidated Fund free of interest. That privilege was withdrawn in 1877. When capital expenditure was comparatively trifling Government bore a share of the cost ; now, when capital expenditure in Ireland cost nearly £100,000 a year, they found themselves deprived of the full grant in aid of maintenance which Parlia- ment formerly granted. The asylum authorities in Ireland, in the absence of any declaration from Parliament that the obligation assumed in 1874 had ceased to exist, regarded the sum claimed by them as a debt of honour due to them by the Imperial Parliament. - Mr. Masterman said that he would look into the matter and reply to the deputation at the earliest possible moment. The Irish Poor-la?r Bill. It was hardly to be expected that Sir John Lonsdale would succeed in carrying his Poor-law (Ireland) Bill through Parliament at present. At the second reading last week the House was counted out. The Bill was on the lines laid down by the report of the Viceregal Commission, a report which received commendation from all parties. The details of the Bill, however, were severely criticised by the Chief Secretary. Anti-vaccination in Ireland. The anti-vaccinationists have been engaged in an active campaign in Ireland for the past few months. They cir- cularise boards of guardians, trying to persuade them not to use their powers compelling parents to have their children vaccinated, and they suggest to the public that there is some injustice to Ireland in the fact that the vaccination laws are more rigid in Ireland than in England. In a few places the guardians have been misled into neglecting their duties. In Waterford, on the other hand, where the guardians are anxious to perform their duty, they have received scant support from the magistrates. Dinner at the Royal College of Physicians. On Saturday evening last Sir Hawtrey Benson, President of the Royal College of Physicians, entertained a large company to dinner in the hall of the College, to meet His Excellency the Lord Lieutenant. Bequests of the late Sir Francis Cruise. The late Sir Francis Cruise left personal property amount- ing to £23,358. He bequeathed his statuette of Sir Dominic Corrigan to the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, and he left considerable sums to charity. The bulk of his estate he divided among his children. Fainre to Obtain a Dispensary Medical Officer. The Clifden guardians find themselves unable at present to obtain a medical officer for the Boffin district of their union. Inishboffin, which constituted the district, is an island off the west coast of Connemara, having no communication with the mainland except by open boat, and in bad weather this fails altogether. There is no private practice, for, except the priest and one familv, the islanders are all too poor to pay fees. The salary offered by the guardians—£170 a year-is unusually high for a dispensary appointment, but so far no candidate has appeared to claim it. May 14th. PARIS. (FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) French Jledicat7 Students in 1912. THE statistics of the students in the different faculties and schools of superior instruction in France on Jan. 15th, 1912, have been published in the administrative bulletin of the Ministry of Public Instruction. The Faculties of Medicine have 8265 students, 7400 (including 742 foreigners) being men and 865 (including 508 foreigners) women. The Schools of Medicine receive 1522 male students, of whom 1481 are French, and 134 women, of whom 116 are French. In the number of entrances the various faculties stand in the follow- ing order : Paris, 4170 ; Lyons, 1601 ; Bordeaux, 791 ; Montpellier, 681 ; then, with smaller entries, Toulouse, Nancy, Lille, and Algiers. Among the schools, Marseilles heads the list with 240 entries ; then come Rennes and Nantes, with 147 and 116 respectively. The other school entries vary in number between 30 and 50. llfedical Fees. An interesting question as to the payment of medical fees has recently been decided by the Paris Tribunal. A young girl on a visit in the neighbourhood of Rheims to an uncle, a farmer, in September, 1908, was caught in an agricultural machine, so that her leg and her arm were smashed. The uncle took the child in haste to Rheims, to his own medical man, who at once removed the injured limbs. When the child’s father arrived from Paris he found her in the doctor’s clinic, which she did not leave until she was cured. When the surgeon’s bill was rendered the father, thinking the charge out of proportion to his financial position, especially as he had had no choice in the matter of the doctor and no opportuuity for agreeing on terms for the operation, declined to pay, asserting that the bill must be settled by the child’s uncle, under whose care she was when the accident happened, and who had called on his own medical attendant to treat the case. The Tribunal now declares that the father must always be held responsible for the fees of a medical man for attendance on a minor child, and ordered him to pay the doctor’s fees of 650 francs, as claimed. Bone Grafting. An interesting discussion on bone grafting took place at the Société de Chirurgie on May 1st in reference to a case related by a military surgeon, Dr. Picque, that of a patient with osteomyelitis in which there was a loss of substance similar to that produced by the resection of a malignant tumour. It is the rule in such cases when operation is performed in a part where two bones are in juxta- position, that direct transplantation should be performed from the neighbouring bone. This Dr. Picqué did in his case ; but he asks whether it is really necessary to have recourse to grafts of living bone, seeing that it has been found possible to obtain bony repair by the use of fragments of dead bone, washed in serum and alcohol and sterilised, which merely play the part of directing the bony repair. It would seem that grafts of living bone can have no other action than this. The graft does not actually take ; bone regeneration merely takes place around it. M. Delbet remarked that in a patient, 34 years of age, with a pseud- arthrosis consequent on a fracture of the neck of the femur seven years previously, he had recently performed an intraosseous graft by the use of 9 centimetres of the fibula. He used a graft completely deprived of periosteum, which he inserted horizontally through the great trochanter, then through the neck of the femur, and without interfering with the pseudarthrosis. The graft had held very well and the patient was able to walk naturally again. He had even sustained subsequently a second fracture of the neck and this united spontaneously. M. Poncet believed that an ivory peg might satisfactorily have replaced the bone deprived of periosteum. He had obtained a very good result by this method in a case of fracture of the calcanenm. He thought that the presence of a foreign body kept up an irritation that favoured bone formation, and that it must be in this way that living bone grafts acted in the majority of cases. This procedure, he said, had the further advantage of not causing loss of substance in another bone, which must necessarily be the case when live grafts are used, and even if the periosteum were left in place it was incapable of
