620 
THE AMERICAN-SCANDIN A VI AN REVIEW 
bination with nitrous oxide anaesthesia, by means of which an easy and 
speedy labor with delivery of a healthy infant can be secured in a large 
majority of women. The safety and reliability of this method of fa¬ 
cilitating childbirth has been tried and tested on thousands of cases in 
New York lying-in hospitals and elsewhere. Dr. Arthur Stein of 
New York, an authority on this subject, expresses himself as greatly 
pleased with his results in hospital and private practice. 
In this connection the care of the sick must be mentioned as an 
important feature of modern American medicine. There are now 8,000 
hospitals in the United States, and the work of caring for the sick and 
disabled is carried out in a constantly improving fashion, assisted by 
the growth of hospitals, dispensaries, maternity wards, infant asylums 
and innumerable sanatoria, public and private, including the care of 
deafmutes, the blind, mental defectives, and the insane. The State 
control of radium also belongs under this heading, the object being to 
place the benefit of this rare and costly substance at the service of the 
needy. It has well been said that radium is suffering from the impos¬ 
sible combination of doctor, physicist, and capitalist. The principal 
field of application of radium and other photo-therapeutic substances 
is in the treatment of inoperative cancerous and other malignant 
growths. As a rule it is necessary to place the radium deeply into the 
diseased tissues by surgical means in order to insure the utmost benefit 
by its action. 
With special reference to the X-ray, a remarkable advance is to 
be registered in its diagnostic application, by means of combined gas- 
inflation and transillumination of the peritoneal cavity—an ingenious 
procedure which permits the recognition of diseased conditions of the 
abdominal organs in many cases. 
Concerning a decided tendency of modern American medicine 
along dietetic lines, it is obvious that the World War, with its mani¬ 
fold privations and restrictions on a large scale, has been a veritable 
revelation in the science of nutrition, as regards the proper applica¬ 
tion of food values. For the first time in their lives, countless persons 
realized the fact that they were in the habit of overeating, not only to 
the depletion of their purses but actually to the detriment of their 
health and anticipation of life. Partly as a war-taught lesson, the 
dietetic treatment of diseases is developing so rapidly and successfully 
as to suggest its applicability to every known form of disease. An 
excellent foundation has been laid with the dietetic treatment of dia¬ 
betes mellitus, and provided the special diet be instituted early enough 
in the disease, only a very small percentage of the cases fail to derive 
notable and permanent benefit, the improvement even persisting after 
the interruption of the dietetic regime. 
A very pronounced tendency of modern medicine on both sides 
of the Atlantic is the tracing of diseased conditions in any part of 
