December 30, 1909] 



NA 7 URE 



243 



Possibly a little more chemistry would have been 

 %velcome to the lawyer. Perhaps, also, the chemist 

 ivould like to see a fuller discussion of the principles 

 of evidence after the manner adopted on p. 245, where 

 not only the practice but the reasons for it are 

 adduced. Precedents, however, bulk largely in legal 

 work; and if the chemist, from his training and 

 mental leanings, would rather have had more prin- 

 ciple and less precedent, it does not follow that he 

 would have found it of more actual utility. Neverthe- 

 less, the author might note these suggestions in view 

 of a second edition. In any case, the book can be 

 recommended as a helpful and interesting one to 

 those for whom it is written. C. Simmonds. 



THE MORPHIA HABIT. 

 The Morphia Habit and its Voluntary Renunciation. 

 A Personal Relation of a Suppression after Twenty- 

 five Years' Addiction. By Dr. Oscar Jennings. 

 Pp. x + 492. (London : Bailliere, Tindall and Co.x, 

 1909.) Price 7^. 6J. net. 

 TT were well, if time permitted, that each physician 

 1- should experience in his own person (meaning 

 thereby his whole person, psyche and soma) a few- 

 typical examples of the complaints which he will have 

 to treat. He would thus acquire an insight into disease 

 obtainable in no other way, and with -Eneas might 

 exclaim : — 



" Quffique ipse miserrima vidi, 

 Et quorum pars magna fui." 

 This apt quotation is found on the title-page of Dr. 

 Jennings's book, and its aptness lies precisely in this, 

 that the book includes, in the shape of a diary, the 

 record, from within, of the overcoming of an addiction 

 to morphia of twenty-five years' standing. Of habit, 

 pernicious, no more typical example could have been 

 selected than the morphia habit, and this treatise 

 presents us with a valuable contribution to the study 

 and solution of a very serious problem. 



Dr. Jennings approaches the problem by two paths, 

 the psychologic and the somatic, in this order. His 

 primary demand is that the patient shall bring, on 

 his part, the desire, the intention, the will (what re- 

 mains of it), to get well ; that before all else the 

 psyche point in the right direction. His next demand 

 is that the physician shall, on his part, supply encour- 

 agement, and shall instil into the patient, first a full 

 confidence in himself as guide, and then a spirit of 

 self-reliance; or the order may be reversed, it does not 

 matter so long as hope, trust, and self-reliance find an 

 entry. He urges, and it must be clear, that the best 

 of all cures can only be upon these lines, and that 

 cures which have been effected without the patient's 

 willing cooperation, a fortiori, against his will, must 

 be inferior in value. To seek a simile, the willing 

 and the unwilling cure may be likened to the cure of 

 an infectious disease, brought about, on the one hand, 

 by the successful resistance of the patient's own 

 tissues, on the other, bv the aid of antidotal powers 

 (anti-toxins) which the efforts of alien tissues have 

 supplied. We have reason to believe that the immunity 

 acquired by the former is the more complete and the 

 more lasting. 



NO. 2096, VOL. 82] 



Dr. Jennings, however, is not content with teaching 

 a reasonable doctrine ; he shows further, by his record 

 of successful cases, the feasibility of the plan which 

 he advocates. With much practical wisdom, he will 

 not allow us to forget that the problem has a somatic 

 side; he is too good a physiologist not to see that 

 to deny this is to deny physiology, "the solid ground 

 of nature " ; also that to recognise a somatic side, yet 

 to deny the possibility of material access to the body, 

 as by the medicaments, is to deny physiology once 

 again, since pharmacology is but a department of 

 physiology. On this subject, the value of drugs in 

 the treatment of the morphia habit, the author has 

 much of interest to tell; in particular he insists upon 

 "his therapeutic triad," the use, namely, of heart 

 tonics— of alkalies, especially Vichy water— and of 

 hydropathic measures, notably the Turkish bath. His 

 views do not always fit in with pharmacological 

 teaching, e.g. in the value which he assigns to 

 sparteine, but here the last word must rest with the 

 clinicist. 



Dr. Jennings's dietetic handling of his subject 

 strikes the reviewer as interesting and original, and 

 as mindful of the dietetic wisdom of the Hippocratic 

 aphorisms. 



By means dietetic and medicinal, as set forth bv the 

 author, the stress of the bodily cravings is eased and 

 the enfeebled will enabled to maintain its operation ; 

 maintaining its operation, volition, according to the 

 law of growth, is gradually built up, the habit of 

 right operation becoming ingrained. Thus in the re- 

 education of the will, the great force of custom is 

 called upon to help to overthrow that dominance 

 which the great force of custom had established — 

 "Certa viriliter " ; said .S. Thomas k Kempis, "con- 

 suetude consuetudine vincitur." The victim of habit 

 mav take these words to heart, and in this record of 

 Dr. Jennings find further encouragement to persevere, 

 and along what lines to seek and find health. 



SCHOOL GARDENS. 

 Practical School Gardening. By P. Elford and Samuel 

 Heaton. Pp. 224. (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1909.) 

 Price 2s. net. 



FEW educational movements of recent years have 

 produced a more copious crop of text-books, 

 hand-books, readers, and so on, than what is called 

 nature-study. This result is not quite in harmony 

 with the spirit of the movement, which is to avoid 

 the book and study the thing. The child is to use 

 his own eyes, to observe the thing itself in its proper 

 habitat, and in relation to its ordinary surroundings ; 

 from these observations he is to make deductions, and 

 thus he is to be trained to think. Of course, the 

 scheme has to be modified to suit the exigencies of 

 the time-table, but it has been shown to work and to 

 give country children a living interest in their sur- 

 roundings, besides providing the teacher with a power- 

 ful engine for education. The final success of the 

 method depends, however, on how far the teacher 

 himself possesses the proper habit of mind, and how 

 far he has overcome the dependence on text-books 



