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 AMERICA N DERMA TOL O GICAL ASSO CIA TION. 417

also be referred to. The value of ergot in purpura was considered by Dr. Bulkley* and by Dr. Minich.f while Dr. Hammond;}; pre- sented an article on the successful treatment of vascular tumors by injection with the fluid extract of the same remedy, and Dr. Bois- not§ discussed the question of transfusion in purpura hemorrhagica. "The effect of small doses of mercury in modifying the number of red blood-corpuscles in syphilis," a paper showing research and much labor, by Dr. Keyes,|l was also published this year.

In pathology, articles by Dr. Heitzmann, "on the nature of the suppurative processes in the skin"^ and on the "development of cancer cells,"** by Drs. Wigglesworthff and Taylor,^]; on sarco- ma of the skin, are especially worthy of remark. In this connec- tion reference may also be made to an admirable review and criti- cism by Dr. R. W. Taylor, §§ on the pathology of syphilis, founded upon the debate on this topic before the London Pathological So- ciety. The neurotic nature of certain cases of purpura, to which attention had been directed as early as 1869 by S. Weir Mitchell, 1||| was again brought to notice by Drs. Tyrrell^f^ and W. T. Taylor.***

Among the rare diseases reference must be made to a case of so- called "podelcoma," from -<;y?, a foot, and tXvMim, an ulcer, re- ported by Dr. Kemper in the American Practitioner, The patient was a young man, an American by birth, whose foot six months before became reddened, swollen, and painful, followed in a few weeks by extreme tenderness of the sole with blebs, which were suc- ceeded by openings from which oozed a glairy fluid resembling the white of an ^%g. Ulcers formed later, which were covered with a whitish, fluffy substance like mould, and which were found to be the openings of deep-burrowing sinuses. On account of the great pain amputation was ultimately performed, when portions of the muscles were discovered to be disintegrated and to contain masses of a mould- like material which under the microscope with two hundred diam- eters was seen to be composed of numerous granulated, rough, irregularly-shaped, yellowish, refractive bodies, which Dr. Kemper regarded as vegetable spores. The disease appears to have been the same as that described by writers in Oriental countries under the names " madura foot," " fungus foot of India," and "mycetoma," the exact nature of which even at the present day does not seem to be positively established. The disease has never, I believe, before been described as occurring in this country,

A rare example of "' congenital elephantiasis of the foot" was also

X Arch, of Clin. Surg., October, 1876. Ibid. II Amer. Jour, of the Med. Sci., January, 1876. If N. Y. Med. Reconi, 1876. XX Ibid., July, 1875. si 11^'^^-. October, 1876. nil Amer. Jour, of the Med. Sci., 1869. "|[^ Pacific Med. and Surg. Jour., June, 1876.
 * Practitioner, November, 1876. f Phila. Med. Times, vol. v. (1875).
 * Ibid. ft Arch, of Derm., January, 1876.
 * Amer. Practitioner, 1876, p. 333.