ELECTRIC DRUGS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIX, Issue 12, 15 January 1910, Page 12

ELECTRIC DRUGS.

Forcing drugs into the syatem alon#the path of an electric current is a novel forni of -treatment for skin diseases, which is now being extensively used at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, writes a Londoner. First introduced by Professor Leduc, of Paris, in 1903, it has only recently emerged from its experimental stages. The treatment consists of passing an electric current through the diseased part, one of the electrodes being covered with a pad soaked in a solution containing a drug or chemical. The electricity breaks up the solution into "ions," which penetrate the tissue cells along with tlie current. • The disease for which ionic medication has proved most successful so far, according to Dr. Lewis Jones, is rodent ulcer — treated with zinc ions. Here a pad of lint soaked /in a 1 per cent, solution of zinc sulphate is placed over the ulcer. A zinc electrode padded with lint, also soaked in the solution and connected with the positive .pole of an ordinary continuous current battery, is then applied over this. The current is applied for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. As the process is sometimes painful, tho part may be first cocaineised by ionisation, a 1 .per cent, solution of cocaine hydrochloride being applied and the current passed for a few minutes.

The Kaiser sent through the Prussian Minister to the Vatican an autograph letter of congratulation upon the occasion of the Papal jubilee. Dalgety's ctimate of the Australasian wool production for the current wool season is 2,388,000 bales, an increase of 100,000 bales on the previous season's exports. The^ Danish farmer now does not confine his effort to keeping records of his cowjs, but the cow-tester also keeps track of the ration that is fed to the growing heifers and to the dry cows. A stringent deportation law, aimed at the heads of Chinese secret societies, is to be submitted by the new council of the Malay States.