1885 v. 28 - Lane Medical Library Digital Document Repository

Editorial. 31
ill-smelling, ill-ventilated, over-crowded hives. The space between
the row of houses in the front and the row in the rear was
only five feet six inches. A house on Essex street had sixteen
rooms, and in these sixteen rooms lived two hundred persons.
The rental of a room was from $1 to $8 per month. A measurement
of the rooms in this house showed that there were ninetyeight
cubic feet to each inhabitant. The lowest space exacted by
the regulations of the Board of Health was six hundred cubic
feet per person."
Without desiring to defend the condition of Chinatown, we do
not like to have it shown off to visitors and to strangers in the
city as the filthiest and most disease-breeding spot on the face
of the globe. No' matter in how crowded a manner the Chinamen
may live, their degredation, the amount of vice which exists
among them, the injury inflicted on the community at large cannot
compare with that of a promiscuous crowd of men, women,
and children herded together on the average of sixteen to the
room, in buildings unprovided with any of the most necessary
sanitarv conveniences.
Hydrochloride of Cocaine.
No drug in the Pharmacopoeia ever sprang into such sudden prominence
as the Chloride of Cocaine; yesterday, useless and almost
unknown ; today, one of the best known and most useful, with its
range of applicability reaching further each day. So comparatively
unknown was the drug, that even its proper name is uncertain,
it being ftalled most commonly the Hydrochlorate of Coe
aine; but as Dr. Shute of Washington suggests, from its combining
with hydrochloric acid to form a binary compound, it
should, according to the latest chemical nomenclature, be named
either the Hydrochloride or Chloride of Cocaine. A mistake has
also been made in spelling Cocaine, Cocoaine as if it came from the
cocoa plant, rather than from the Erythoxylon Coca.
Its peculiar action as a local anaesthetic was discovered by Dr.
Koller, who is studying in Vienna, and at his request Dr. Brittauer
of Trieste exhibited its wonderful effect upon the mucous membrane
of the eye, at the Opthalmic Congress at Heidelberg.
Within a few minutes of the application of a two to four per cent,
solution the eye can be handled, and even struck a perceptible blow,
without pain being felt; and the pain experienced during an op-