Cold Reception Research Articles

PERSPECTIVES: Tethered-toxin debut gets cold reception

Since the discovery of the functional diversity of Na+ currents in primary sensory neurones, the physiological reasons for their heterogeneity have been the subject of investigation and speculation. This is certainly true for the tetrodotoxin-resistant and kinetically slow NaV1.8 current expressed in small diameter nociceptive neurones. The normal expression pattern is confined to neurones in sensory ganglia, and this channel has been the subject of scrutiny over many years as a possible novel pharmacological target for the treatment of pain. Because of its relatively depolarized activation voltage dependence, one possible functional attribute is that the channel may continue to function in small diameter afferents when depolarized, for example in the face of raised external K+. This possibility was recognized by Jim Elliott and colleagues many years ago, but it is in the study of cold reception that this plausibility has become something close to a certainty. In the presence of large and long-lasting receptor potentials, when other Na+ channel subtypes should be substantially inactivated, NaV1.8 still functions and endows excitability to corneal cold receptors (e.g. Carr et al. 2002). The knock-out of NaV1.8 has recently been shown to suppress nociception under cold conditions (Zimmermann et al. 2007), and also to inhibit menthol-induced enhanced cold responses (Zimmermann et al. 2007). A widely held view concerning gene knock-outs is that the functional consequences can be modified or diluted by alterations in the expression of other genes, and this argument was put forward at the time in order to explain the phenotype of the NaV1.8 knock-out mouse, where the (apparently) fairly mild phenotypic changes accompanying channel loss were in part explained by a compensatory up-regulation of NaV1.7. What has been described now in the paper by Sturzebecher et al. (2010) in this issue of The Journal of Physiology is a cell-autonomous tethered-toxin approach for the investigation of NaV1.8 function, where the expression of NaV1.8 is expected to be normal, but where channel function is suppressed (although not abolished) by the provision of tethered conotoxin MrVIa (Daly et al. 2004) on the outside of the nerve membrane. The utilized transgene encoding the toxin included genomic DNA incorporating modified SCN10a, resulting in expression of the toxin in sensory neurones when the SCN10a promoter is activated. The toxin was engineered as the most distal part of a glycophosphatidylinositol anchored extracellular protein, and the evidence presented indicates that in practice this fusion protein is sufficiently flexible to allow the tethered-toxin to exhibit its pharmacological action and block NaV1.8. The partial toxin block of NaV1.8 brings about a reduction in noxious cold sensitivity and a substantially reduced behavioural response to noxious cold (0°C; Fig. 4C in Sturzebecher et al. 2010; highlighted in the authors’ Supplemental movie, available online). These findings are consistent with the abolition of behavioural responses to cold following the ablation of neurochemically distinguished isolectin-IB4+ve neurones, by endogenous production of diphtheria toxin controlled by the SCN10a promotor (Abrahamsen et al. 2008). A contribution made by Snape et al. (2010) was to show that IB4+ve, small diameter sensory neurones, well known to be endowed with more functional NaV1.8 than similarly sized IB4–ve neurones, retain their excitability with applied depolarization approaching –20 mV, potentials at which IB4–ve neurones were rendered inexcitable. The following conclusions seem almost inescapable. Firstly, nociceptive nerve endings in the cold may be undergoing a resting depolarization to some degree, by loss of K+ channels as suggested by Gordon Reid (Reid & Flonta 2001) (whether or not they contain e.g. TRPM8 menthol receptors or other cold-gated channels), or tetrodotoxin-sensitive Na+ channels become functionally unavailable because of the effect of cold on gating (Zimmermann et al. 2007). Secondly, NaV1.8 allows sensory encoding to occur in depolarized endings in the cold (Carr et al. 2002; Zimmermann et al. 2007), and finally, NaV1.8 is the likely channel to encode cold (Carr et al. 2002; Zimmermann et al. 2007; Sturzebecher et al. 2010). It is our expectation that NaV1.8 will play other additional special roles that have yet to be clearly defined.

Preface

Preface Peter L. Rudnytsky According to my trusty 1966 edition of Webster's New World Dictionary, the primary meaning of "radical" is "of or from the root or roots; going to the center, foundation, or source of something; fundamental; basic; as, a radical principle"; only secondarily does it mean "favoring fundamental or extreme change; specifically, favoring such change of the social structure; very leftist." Although only the first and last of our essays in this issue could be called radical in the latter sense, all four are radical in that they go "to the center, foundation, or source" of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. In "Back to the Roots: The Influence of Ian D. Suttie on British Psychoanalysis," Gabriele Cassullo masterfully contextualizes the achievement of the author of The Origins of Love and Hate, whose 1935 magnum opus is "one of the by no means rare 'secret books' of psychoanalysis," which has through the years been accorded a "cold reception" by the psychoanalytic establishment out of a well-founded concern that "the ideas advocated therein might jeopardize the very roots of Freudian theory." For Cassullo, Suttie remains "the very prototype of the Independent analyst" because he combines "an in-depth knowledge of, and interest in, Freudian theory"—however critically he regarded many of its axioms—"with a 'structure of feeling' firmly grounded at once in British psychology and psychiatry and the Hungarian psychoanalytic tradition shaped by Ferenczi's legacy." As a founder and co-director of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination, a public forum of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, Francis Levy has placed all friends of psychoanalysis in his debt. Although Levy acknowledges that "the practice of psychoanalysis on an everyday level is an aristocratic activity," requiring in its classical form an investment of time and money that is likely to be out of reach for most people, his account of his [End Page 1] own twenty-nine-year odyssey on the couch, amounting by his calculation to nearly five thousand sessions at a total cost of some one million dollars in fees, is nothing if not radical in its unsparing honesty both about the excesses that led him to seek treatment and about the tenacity of his commitment to the quest for "the patient's cure." I regret that it is beyond my power to gratify Levy's fantasy of seeing his essay published in The New Yorker, but I hope he will share my sense of pride and pleasure that it adorns the pages of American Imago. The longevity of Francis Levy's career as a patient is exceeded by that of Stanley A. Leavy as a psychoanalyst. "What Happened to Psychoanalysis?" is Leavy's distillation of the checkered fate of the psychoanalytic enterprise beginning with Freud, from the vantage point of his own more than six decades as a participant-observer in the field since receiving his training at the New York Institute in the late 1940s. While not minimizing either the internal or the external causes of the decline in the prestige of psychoanalysis in the United States since its heyday, Leavy defines "the art of analysis" as having "a feel for the presence of self-concealment" and "the tact needed to conduct our patients to recognizing it," and he remains committed to its value even—and perhaps especially—in our own overpopulated world in which there are increasingly "fewer resources at hand for the culture of the individual soul within society." In his memoir, Francis Levy refers to the "many cases eloquently written up in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly." Our final contributor, Henry J. Friedman, focuses on one such case history, by Ilany Kogan, detailing her treatment of the replacement child of a Holocaust survivor, and the responses to Kogan's paper by Charles Brenner, Antonino Ferro, and James Herzog. Through a close reading of these texts, Friedman mounts a trenchant argument against both theoretical pluralism and the critiques of Kogan's work offered from a classical perspective by Brenner and a Bionian perspective by Ferro, both of which Friedman regards as insufficiently attentive to "the experiential world of the patient." Even Kogan herself, Friedman contends, notwithstanding...

Alberto Savinio's Alcesti di Samuele in the Aftermath of the Second World War

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Alcesti di Samuele (Alcestis, Daughter of Samuel), by Italian writer, painter, set designer, and composer Alberto Savinio (1891-1952), voices the anxiety that surrounds the difficult process of postwar reconstruction. Savinio warns against the dangerous manifestations of nationalism that are ingrained in human nature, arguing that the only solution against future threats of totalitarianism is to take refuge in one's intellect, to maintain a critical detachment and resist propagandistic enticements. As Brecht had parodied the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, (1) Savinio rationalizes past events through a deconstruction of the myth of the dictator as a supernatural being. In Alcesti di Samuele, the former American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt states: Molti cercano la soluzione del fascismo e io questa soluzione l'ho trovata: smettere di pronunciare il nome di Mussolini. In un mese, del fascismo non rimarra, traccia.... La colpa del fascismo e del nazismo si imputa a Mussolini e a Hitler. Errore. La colpa e dei popoli che hanno espresso dai propri visceri questi due personaggi cosi profondamente, cosi pericolosamente, cosi tragicamente espressivi. II dittatore un mezzo, uno strumento, un intermediario, un irrresponsabile, un passivo. Il dittatore e una vittima. (2) (Many people are looking for a solution to Fascism; I have found a solution: to stop saying Mussolini's name. In a month there will be no trace of Fascism.... The responsibility for Fascism and Nazism is attributed to Mussolini and Hitler. This is a mistake. The responsibility lies with their peoples, who have expressed from their own bowels two characters so deeply, so dangerously, so tragically expressive. The dictator is a means, a tool, a middleman, an irresponsible, passive individual. The dictator is a victim.) Set in Munich during the Second World War, Alcesti di Samuele centers on the ultimate sacrifice of Teresa Goerz, a Jewish woman who commits suicide to protect the career of her Christian husband, Paul. Published by Bompiani in 1949, the play received a cold reception when it premiered in 1950 at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan under the direction of Giorgio Strehler. The story of Teresa's voluntary death becomes, in Savinios imagery, a modern echo of the archetypical myth of Alcestis who, in Euripides' homonymous play, chooses to die in her husband Admetus's stead. In Alcestis, Heracles compensates Admetus's generous hospitality by bringing back Alcestis from the underworld after defeating Thanatos, the personification of death. As Teresa's sacrifice replicates the tragedy of Alcestis, the plot requires a new Heracles to rescue her from the underworld. In Alcesti di Samuele, Roosevelt, who helped to deliver Europe from the horrors of the Second World War, is the last representative of a long series of Heracleses, whose task is to conduct periodic purifications of the world, each time having to face different challenges (96). (3) Roosevelt/Heracles is the emblem of libertarianism and democracy, whereas the last embodiment of the Lernean Hydra, one of the monsters defeated by Heracles, is totalitarianism itself. Hence his katabatic mission to retrieve Teresa/Alcestis symbolizes the defeat of the triumphal violence and brutality that nourish totalitarian regimes. …

Stem-cell claim gets cold reception

Stem-cell claim gets cold reception

Critical factors of ASP acceptance in SMEs: an empirical study of Chinese ASP clients

The adoption of ASP is experiencing a revival after cold reception by the market and initiates further study to guide industry development. The retrospective study of current ASP clients' acceptance is helpful for a better understanding of ASP acceptance motivation. This paper identified 11 critical factors after considering the ASP value expectations and Chinese IS implementation uniqueness. One hundred and forty-seven current ASP clients of Shanghai are surveyed to test these critical factors. Data analysis reveals that significant acceptance facilitators of ASP include: application service quality, infrastructure assurance, vendor reliability, contract pricing, top management orientation and industry or supply chain drive and IT capability. Some specific Chinese features also are found to explain ASP acceptance in SMEs in China as well. These empirical results are useful both for vendors to optimise the business model and clients to make decisions.

The lived experience of losing a loved one to a sudden death in KwaZulu‐Natal, South Africa

The aim of this study was to describe the lived experiences of families in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, who had lost a loved one to a sudden death. Sudden death implies a natural or unnatural death which is unexpected; occurs without warning; and in some cases, could have been prevented. It usually occurs out of hospital, in the emergency department, or shortly after handing the client over to either critical care or operating theatre personnel. A sudden death has the capacity to leave the bereaved emotionally damaged and may exaggerate the responses to grief. An interpretive hermeneutic phenomenological research approach was chosen for this study, as this allows the researcher to describe a phenomenon as experienced and to attempt to provide an understanding of the internal meanings of a person's experiences in the lived world. The sample included five bereaved family members who had lost a loved one to a sudden death and who were all members of a bereavement support group held in Durban, South Africa. Bereaved families interviewed described five themes namely: 'cold reception' of the hospital staff, lack of closure, acknowledgement of loss, 'loneliness of grief' and helping others. This qualitative study provides rich data regarding what bereaved family members view as important in their care during this time of crisis. The value of simple, small gestures by the health professional is enlightening. This information can be used to ensure that health professionals purposely direct their interventions and interactions with the bereaved family to ensure that they are managed in the most therapeutic way possible.

Warming up the Cold Reception at a TRPM8 Function: Figure 1.

The transient receptor potential (TRP) family of cation-permeable channels responds to mechanical, thermal, and chemical stimuli originating from inside and outside the cell ([Clapham, 2003][1]). The TRP (melastatin)-8 (TRPM8) channel is expressed in a subpopulation of temperature-sensing dorsal

Channelling cold reception

Perception of cold and hot is one of life's essentials. Three research teams find that, when a temperature-sensing receptor is deleted in mice, the animals lose their response to a range of cold temperatures. A variety of different ion channels have been suggested to underlie the detection of cold stimuli, and the role of each of these in detecting innocuous cool versus noxious cold has been much debated. The menthol receptor TRPM8 is a strong candidate as a cold transducer, but its physiological importance has been questioned. A study of cold sensitivity in TRPM8 knockout mice has clarified matters. Mice lacking the receptor are deficient in the ability to sense cold at the cellular level, in intact nerve fibres and in whole animal (behavioural) tests. TRPM8 is clearly the primary contributor to peripheral cold sensation, with animals lacking this channel unable to discriminate between warm and cold surfaces until the temperature drops to below 10 °C.

Neutron scattering. The case for neutron sources.

Next-generation neutron sources are under construction in the United States and Japan. But plans for the equivalent European project, the European Spallation Source (ESS), have recently received a cold reception by the German research council. In their Policy Forum, [Keimer, Sackmann, and Withers][1] argue that without the ESS, Europe will fall behind in fields as diverse as physics, engineering, and biophysics. They strongly urge the council to reconsider its position. [1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/298/5593/543

Executive Order 13233 Further Implementation of the Presidential Records Act

President Bush recently signed Executive Order 13233 allowing/or the release of a select category of presidential records dealing with staff advice to the president, an important group of records for those who study presidential decision making. The order provides such records can he made public only after the incumbent and former presidents agree on their release. The order was given a cold reception from individuals who use materials in presidential libraries and the organizations representing those with interests in records, as it will be an additional hurdle for researchers to surmount. Supporters and critics alike expect the courts to resolve the issues of presidential privilege raised by the order.

Client Experience in Psychotherapy: What Heals and What Harms?

The purpose of this paper is to examine what heals and harms the client in the psychotherapeutic encounter, from the client’s perspective. The experience of eight clients was explicated using a model based on Giorgi and Schweitzer. The counselling experienced as healing by clients has at its core a vibrantly warm and honest relationship where the client feels held in the safety of the good heart space of the counsellor. The counselor is experienced as providing an intense beingness for the client that embraces the client’s suffering and provides solid ground created out of the crucible of the counsellor’s own encounter with his or her shadow. The counsellor is emptied out of his/her own agenda and provides space for the client’s experience. The counsellor can evoke the higher resources of the client. The counselling is experienced as renewing and reconnecting the clients to his/her sense of self, of other and the lifeworld.The counselling relationship experienced as harming is described as being drained of human presence and transforming power. There is no alive human connection. The counsellor is experienced as insubstantial, and has no ability to hold traumatic experience. The counsellor’s cold reception to the client’s vulnerabilities has the power to shatter, fragment and splinter the client. The counsellor is full of self. This fullness may be ego that manifests as dry intellectualising or playing manipulative games as a substitute for human presence. This may lead the client to terror, sickness and anxiety. The counsellor may be full of their own fears and are experienced by the client as chaotic, avoidant and overwhelmed. Their unavailability leads clients to experience emotional depletion, exhaustion and frustration. The counsellor’s self-righteousness, judgement and critical disengagement are experienced by clients as being belittled, condemned and diminished. The therapeutic encounter results in a weakening of the human potential for recovery. Both client and counselor emerge as lesser human beings, with weakened relationships to self, others and the world.

Central projections of the antennal cold receptor neurons and hygroreceptor neurons of the cockroach Periplaneta americana

The central projections of the cold receptor axons were examined by filling two types of cold receptive sensilla with cobalt lysine--a cold and hygroreceptive (C/H) sensillum and a cold receptive and olfactory (C/O) sensillum--on the antennae of the cockroach, Periplaneta americana L. When the dye filled a single C/H sensillum, four axons were stained. Three of these axons terminate in the ipsilateral antennal lobe, while the other branches in the ipsilateral dorsal lobe. One of the branches passed through the tritocerebrum to terminate in the suboesophageal ganglion, while the other branches end in the lobe. When a single C/O sensillum is dye filled, all axons of the four receptor neurons terminate exclusively in the ipsilateral antennal lobe. One axon from the C/H sensillum and one axon from the C/O sensillum terminate in a particular glomerulus in the ventroposterior region of the antennal lobe. Each of these axons also has a tuft in separate glomeruli situated just dorsal to the glomerulus in which both axons terminate. This set of three glomeruli have indistinct boundaries and appear to form a complex of glomeruli similar to the macroglomerular complex of male moths. Assuming modality-specific convergence of antennal afferents, these axons appear to belong to the cold receptor neurons, and the set of glomeruli appear to function in cold reception. Two other neurons stained from C/H sensilla always terminate in the glom-eruli distinct from the set of glomeruli mentioned earlier. These neurons are assigned to the pair of hygroreceptor neurons, and their glomeruli are thought to function in hygroreception.

A cold reception: Holocaust survivors in the Netherlands and their return1

(1994). A cold reception: Holocaust survivors in the Netherlands and their return. Patterns of Prejudice: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 47-65.

Hypothalamic thermosensitivity in conscious Pekin ducks.

Conscious Pekin ducks with chronically implanted hypothalamic thermodes were submitted to thermoneutral (Ta 25 degrees C), cold (Ta 5 degrees C), and warm (Ta 33 degrees C) ambient temperatures. Hypothalamic temperature (Thy) was varied in nine steps between 27.9 and 43.5 degrees C in repeated experiments. Cooling of the hypothalamus induced a fall of core temperature (Tc) that was linearly related to Thy and amounted to 1.1--1.3 degrees C at highest cooling intensity. The decrease of Tc was caused by inhibition of metabolic heat production and/or vasodilatation in the skin at cold and thermoneutral Ta and by activation of panting at warm Ta. After the end of cooling a temporary overshoot of heat production occurred, the degree of which depended on the degree of cooling and on Ta, and led to a rapid normalization of Tc. Warming of the hypothalamus induced a slight fall of Tc due to a reduction of metabolic heat production at cold and thermoneutral Ta and to an activation of panting at warm Ta. It is concluded that no specific cold reception and a weak specific warm reception exist in the duck's hypothalamus. A "nonsensory" temperature susceptibility of hypothalamic control functions is responsible for those reactions of thermoregulatory effector activities which do not fall into the categories of adequate thermoregulatory responses to a central thermal stimulus.

Refugees Within Israel: The Case of the Villagers of Kafr Bir‘im and Iqrit

On April 1, 1973, near Hadera in Israel, almost 7,000 Arabs and Jews took part in an open air meeting of solidarity with the inhabitants of Kafr Bir'im and Iqrit. I The meeting was a reminder that the cause of these two small, empty ruined villages in northern Israel along the Lebanese border, so prominent in 1972, has still not died. The inhabitants of these two villages the Uprooted, as they have been termed in the Israeli press who were dispossessed by the Israeli army in 1948, have been struggling from within Israel for a quarter of a century for the right to return to their homes. In 1972, their case finally burst into the open and provoked controversy inside Israel and among both Jews and non-Jews outside. Some indication of the impact upon American Jewish opinion of the demand of these villagers to return to their homes in 1972, and its cold reception by the Israeli government, is suggested by an article in the American Jewish Congress periodical, the Congress Bi-weekly, by Chaim I. Waxman. Acknowledging that the affair of the villages had received some coverage in the United States, Waxman expressed the fear that the Israeli government's refusal to allow the villagers to return could become a major weapon in the arsenals of critics of Zionism and Israel. Presenting a point of view favourable to the dispossessed villagers and critical of the government's handling of the situation, Waxman affirmed: Before too much time elapses, it behooves us to reexamine the issues involved in this most difficult question which presents Israel with one of its most serious moral challenges. 2 In Israel

On Facing Artificiality and Frivolity: Theories of Pastoral Poetry in Eighteenth-Century France

THERE IS a curiously wide discrepancy in critical assessment of pastoral poetry in the eighteenth century. On the one hand, critics and theorists apparently felt that the poetry of their time was vulnerable to attack. They particularly recognized that the eclogue was an artificial kind of poetry whose excessive conventionality could quickly become boring. D'Alembert speaks of the cold reception his contemporaries granted to poetry in general and to pastoral poetry in particular. Theocrite, Virgile, et Fontenelle ont epuise tout ce qu'on peut dire sur les bois, les fontaines, et les troupeaux. 1 The introduction of these rustic elements in contemporary poetry seemed to him ridiculous and out of place, since one can express simple feelings without such traditional accoutrements. Florian, in 1787, felt that the genre had fallen so low in public esteem that qu'on annonce un ouvrage dont les heros sont des bergers, il semble que ce nom seul donne envie de dormir. 2 Still other critics exhibit a certain sheepishness about bothering to speak of the pointless and frivolous pastoral. To take an example exaggerated in form but rather typical in spirit, Fraguier began a lengthy Dissertation sur l'eglogue apologetically, seeing the time he was spending on the subject as a vacation for his mind, a relaxation from serious pursuits.3 Yet, on the other hand, the genre itself was far from having lost its attraction for the eighteenth-century reader. The eclogues of Virgil virtually rang in the ears of a Fenelon, who found in them the incarnation of the natural, the simple, and the naive; quotations from the Eclogues and the Georgics, along with occasional references to such

The dual character of peripheral cold reception

The dual character of peripheral cold reception

Le rapport Tindemans et les élections européennes

The Tindemans report on the European union and the decision to organize direct elections for the European Parliament have been two important events in European afjairs in 1976. This article analyses the origins, developments and bearing of these two events.Although his mandate was initiated and encouraged at the highest level - that of the European heads of state - , Mr. Tindemans' attempt to propose concrete steps in order to achieve a real political union in Europe did not get through. It received a rather cold reception from several states who opposed some of his proposals on different grounds.At the Conference of The Hague, Mr. Tindemans was able to get a formal support to his ideas, but no decision was taken to implement any of them.The decision to organize direct elections for the European Parliament, which can be seen as a concrete step toward the implementation of the long awaited European union, is facing the same kind of resistance at the national level. Although the Nine have all agreed to do everything possible to organize these elections in the spring of 1978, there are still unsolved problems which are both technical and political. Moreover, even if they are taking place, it is not at all sure that they will bring about substantive changes in the role and functions of the European Parliament.

Margaret Fuller and the British Reviewers

N the middle of the last century the way to the approval of reviewers for the literary woman lay through conformity with the current ideals of what was expected of her sex. Political bias in reviewing was acknowledged, and moral prejudice was common. But, even if she was reasonably conventional in politics and morals, the woman of letters of the 1840's and 1850's might count on the cordiality of reviewers only if she did at least lip-service to nineteenth-century notions of correct domestic life. A spinster of independent mind could expect only a cold reception in the press. If that same spinster took a husband and acquired a family, thus serving in the noble capacity of wife and mother, she became a changed creature, and critical opinion was likely to undergo a corresponding change. Something very like this happened in the case of Margaret Fuller, now generally accepted as the most reliable critic produced in America prior to 1850. During 1840-1842 she had served as editor of the Dial and had subsequently conducted for twenty months a regular literary column in Horace Greeley's Tribune. During this time she had produced some excellent articles, far above the ordinary level of journalistic reviewing. Her measured praise of Longfellow and Lowell and her just criticism of Emerson approach much nearer the present estimates than other contemporary criticism, and her first judgments of Goethe, Carlyle, Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, Tennyson, Balzac, and George Sand are surprisingly in accord with present-day opinions. She had four books to her credit by 1846: a translation of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe; Summer on the Lakes, an account of a trip to the West; Woman in the Nineteenth Century, a confession of faith in her sex; and Papers on Literature and Art, chiefly

On Metalloscopia

It is now almost thirty years since Dr. Burq first observed the favourable effect produced by the external application of different metals on patients suffering from various forms of anæsthesia. Burq remarked that the same effect was not produced by the same metal in all cases, but that the therapeutic success was due in one case to gold and in another to iron. This fact led him to assume that, in cases where one metal proved beneficial when applied to the skin, still better results might be obtained by giving this patient a preparation of the metal that suited him for internal use, and thus promoting a constitutional action. But even his first assertions met with a cold reception, and his later assertions of the success obtained by internal use of the metals received quite emphatic denial from the profession, so that the whole question fell into discredit. Nothing daunted by this, and fully convinced of the accuracy of his observations, Burq applied to the Société de Biologie in Paris, to appoint a committee to test his assertions impartially, and report on the results of their investigations. A committee, consisting of MM. Charcot, Luys and Dumontpallier, was appointed, and on the 14th of April, 1877, M. Dumontpallier, as speaker, delivered the following report:—