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 

 a right 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 

 it is 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 deplorar 

 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- 

 ganic diseases over which art has no more power, he has continually 

 under his observation, unfortunate beings who with the sinister quali- 

 ty of incurable, come, in the midst of sufferings as difficult to describe 

 as 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 

 a 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 to 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 the discovery of the utility of 

 iodine in scrofulous diseases ; but from the great number of cures 



