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dited plans of treatment. The results attained by enlightened 

 empiricism are sometimes received with acclamation; and not unfre- 

 quently take the highest rank among the improvements in practical 

 medicine. But there are comparatively few minds possessing the 

 qualities requisite to originate, either empirically or by the process 

 of induction, improved methods of treating individual diseases. It 

 is for this reason that the publications of a year, periodic and mono- 

 graphic, though richly stored with the products of scientific research 

 in animal chemistry, physiology, hygiene, and general pathology, 

 present so meagre an account of substantial improvements in the art 

 of healing, strictly so called. 



The tests of improvements in practical medicine, are the benefits 

 derivable from means, new or old, applied in certain forms or con- 

 ditions of disease in which they had not been previously employed, 

 or not employed in the usual methods, — benefits not obtainable, or, 

 if so, not so readily, or to the same extent, by the treatment ordi- 

 narily prescribed in the same affections. To decide by these tests 

 what are real improvements is, in many instances, a task not only 

 of magnitude but of great delicacy; it demands time and a patient 

 interrogation of nature, — a scrutinous comparison of the effects pro- 

 duced by the old and established methods of treatment with the 

 effects produced by the new. To what results an examination of 

 the recent innovations in the management of certain diseases, con- 

 ducted in the mode now referred to, would lead, the committee are 

 not prepared to report. 



But though unable, at this time, to express any opinions on the 

 subjects which might come under their remark or criticism in this 

 department of their duty, the committee beg leave to submit a com- 

 munication obligingly furnished them by Dr. Gurdon Buck, one of 

 the Surgeons of the New York Hospital, relating to a remedy inge- 

 niously conceived and successfully employed by that gentleman, in 

 cases of oedematous laryngitis in its suffocative stage. Though the 

 remedy referred to is surgical, the disease to which it is applicable 

 is strictly medical, and, for this reason, it may not inappropriately 

 be introduced to the notice of the Association by the Committee on 

 Practical Medicine. On examining the record of cases treated by 

 Dr. Buck, and his reflections upon them, together with the beautiful 

 pictorial illustrations of the forms of the disease, and the mode of 

 applying the means of relief, we cannot but express the belief that 

 a most valuable improvement has been made in the treatment of a 

 formidable disease. The practice consists in scarifying the oedema- 



