see 
Miscellanies. 387 © 
disease, very common among the poor, the treatment of which was 
so long and so difficult, that it has been rigorously excluded from our. 
hospitals, has become curable in a limited time and by unexpensive, 
means, so that the numerous poor who are attacked with it have now 
aright to be admitted and treated in the hospitals like other patients. 
The new facts which your committee have obtained, must produce 
on this point an entire conviction. The cases exhibited to us were 
not those of scrofula of the first or second stage, but scrofula of the: 
most inveterate form,—real scrofulous consumptions, as they are call- 
ed in medicine. Deep alteration of the glands and other organs, ac- 
tual lesions of the bones and their principal articulations, with those 
general accompaniments which announce a speedy death, have been, 
and we assert it, in great numbers, entirely cured in the space of a 
few months; and, saving the indelible marks which such deep seated 
diseases cannot fail to leave, these patients enjoy all the health which 
itis possible for them to obtain. These results are so much the 
More deserving of attention, and so much the more satisfactory, as 
the greater number of the patients which M. Lugol has subjected to 
his treatment, . were, before he commenced with them, in a hopeless 
state, and which had been admitted into his rooms only as deplora- 
ble examples of the ravages of an incurable disease. One of your 
committee is perhaps as favorably situated as possible for apprecia- 
ting the merits of M. Lugol’s clinical researches. A physician in 
the largest hospital of Paris, of a numerous division filled with or- 
§anic diseases over which art has no more power, he has continually 
under his observation, unfortunate beings who with the sinister quali- 
ly of incurable, come, in the midst of sufferings as difficult to describe 
8S to lessen, to die in the places provided for them. Among the un- 
fortunate beings who are thus destined, are frequently found scrofu- 
lous persons, whose mutilations are truly horrible. Before the dis- 
Covery of iodine, they were all devoted to certain death; but, since 
the introduction of iodine and bromine into therapeutics, your com- 
‘Mittee have had the sweet satisfaction of restoring to life, and even to 
4 tolerable existence, many of these incurables; and, what it is not 
unimportant to add, these cures have been as rapid as unexpected. 
We shall not here go into the minute facts which M. Lugol has sub- 
mitted to us. We have added a few of them fo this report, but they 
are not of a nature to be read. Such descriptions would only sadden 
the feelings, without any advantage to science. M. Lugol, as we 
have before stated, does not pretend to thg discovery of the utility of 
jodine in scrofulous diseases; but from the great number of cures 
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