Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 June 1877 — Effect of Metals upen Anaesthesia. [ARTICLE]

Effect of Metals upen Anaesthesia.

Some twenty-five years ago a certaintM. Burq, a doctor in France, announced a discovery at which science looked with little favor. He declared that the application of certain metals to the human body relieved the malady of anaesthesia, and restored the faculty of sensation. Some patients could be helped by the touch of gold, copper agreed better with others, and zinc suited the constitution of a third set. Very lately some memoers of the Societe de Biologic have given M. Burq’s practice a trial, with results which seem satisfactory enough. For example, a patient of the Salpetriere, a girl of about sixteen, subject to hallucinations, and unable to feel on the right side of her body, was treated with a gold bracelet. It is said that before the application of the bracelet she allowed herself to be pinched and pricked with needles with perfect indifference. Fifteen minutes after the ornament was clasped round her wrist the skin became of a more healthy color, and the slightest touch of the needle drew blood and provoked ejaculations from the sufferer. Her right eye, which had been blind during her illness, now distinguished colors, and her right ear detected sounds. On other patients gold had no effect, but zinc or copper restored, for the time, the lost senses. It is to be noticed that in a few hours the deadness to feeling returned in these hysterical subjects, ana it is also said that what the right side of the body gained, the left side lost. So, on the whole, the discovery seems rather curious than profitable.— London Daily New». —As a dandy was wending his way through a narrow passage at the top of Charlotte street, Glasgow, he met a pretty girl, and said to her: “Pray, iny dear, what do you call this passage?” “Balaam’s passage,” she -replied. “Ah, then,” said he, “I’m like Balaamstopped by an angel,” “And I,” rejoined the girl, as she pushed past him, “am like an angel—stopped byanaas.”