I

HOW INFLUENZA GOT IN

NFLUENZA DOES NOT ARISE; it travels. It reached the United States by crossing the Atlantic, and it would seem that it might have been kept out. This is, in fact, the editorial opinion of The Scientific American (New York, November 2), which under the heading "A Carelessly Guarded Gate," charges that the laxity of port authorities on our Eastern coast is responsible for an invasion that has caused more deaths among peaceful citizens than the deadly weapons of the enemy have effected on the front of battle. Instead of establishing a rigid quarantine, the authorities seem to have ignored the infectious character of the disease and placed its victims in the open wards of hospitals, where it quickly spread. This all took place in the land of Gorgas, whose people can tame a fever-infected swamp one day and then calmly take disease to their own bosoms the next! Says the paper named above: "There is a growing conviction that the sudden invasion of the United States by that European epidemic known as Spanish influenza, and the speed with which it has spread throughout the country, are due to the laxity with which the port authorities along the Atlantic seaboard have carried out their duties. ...

"If ever there was a period when the quarantine laws for guarding the ports of the United States against the entrance of disease should have been enforced with redoubled vigilance, it was during the summer and autumn of the present year, when it was known that a highly infectious and fatal disease was sweeping through Europe like a scourge of the Middle Ages. "In view of the imminence and deadly character of the disease, we had every reason to expect that the Federal authorities would set a double guard at our ports of entry, and instruct our quarantine officials to take every possible preventive measure against the landing, not merely of influenza patients, but of every passenger who had been exposed, during the ocean voyage, to infection.

"Nor can any carelessness be excused on the ground that influenza has never been classed with the deadly diseases, such

as yellow fever or the bubonic plague. While such an excuse might be valid for the layman, it can not be allowed in the case of the expert professional men, whose duty it is to enforce the quarantine laws of the country. For they know full well that this was no ordinary epidemic of influenza or grip. The medical records of Europe were available; and the most cursory reading of the data that have appeared in the medical journals (to go no further than that) should have revealed to these men that here was a disease the exclusion of which from America called for the most exacting and rigid enforcement of the quarantine laws. "The obvious thing to have done, when the first ship with influenza patients on board cast anchor at a quarantine station, was to isolate that ship, with every soul on board, until the slightest possibility of carrying infection ashore had been removed. The rigid precautions that would be taken, if an arriving ship had yellow-fever patients aboard, should surely have been taken in the case of this deadly scourge.

"But what are the facts? Incredible as it may seem, influenza cases by the score and, for all we know, by the hundred, were taken ashore and placed in the general wards of the hospitals. Fellow passengers of the patients, who must inevitably have been exposed to infection, and must many of them have been carrying the disease, were allowed to go their several ways throughout the land.

"Was ever official fatuity stretched to greater lengths than this!

"When once the ship's company had scattered, whether to spread the infection among fellow patients in a general hospital, or among the unsuspecting and unwarned citizens in home, office, passenger-car, or theater, the mischief was done. But even when the plague burst forth in all its wide-spread malignity, both New York and the country at large seemed slow to awaken to the enormity of the peril. Only here and there did the authorities act with swift and effective measures, closing schools, theaters, and public meeting-places.

"It is certainly a disconcerting fact that, at the very time when the country had organized itself, through the Red Cross and other famous organizations, to fight disease and prevent suffering, we should be smitten with a visitation which caused more casualties and deaths in the homeland than occurred among our troops in the great world-war."

CURING MADNESS BY TOOTH-PULLING

I

NFECTED TEETH are a cause of insanity, if we are to credit a recent official report of Dr. H. A. Cotton, medical director of the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane at Trenton. He asserts that as a result of eleven years' experimentation he has effected permanent cures by extracting teeth after examination with x-rays, removing infected tonsils, and clearing up the digestive tract. Early cases, he says, were cured very quickly, and even chronic ones have been relieved. Naturally, Dr. Cotton's report has caused considerable interest and a good deal of comment, not all of it favorable. Some authorities point out that mental disease arises from a variety of causes, of which infection from the teeth must be only one, and relatively insignificant. This, however, is apparently not in conflict with Dr. Cotton's contentions, as he does not appear to assign infection as a general or universal cause of mental disease. He says, as quoted in the New York Times:

"We are able to cure early cases in a very short time, prevent the disease from becoming chronic in a large number of cases, and restore a certain number who have been in the hospital for as long as nine years. This we are doing daily. We have found that infection of the chronic type and the resulting toxemia are the basis of many mental disturbances. These chronic infections are known as focal infections and may be present for years without their existence becoming known to the patient, and until quite recently the physicians and the dentists have been ignorant of their existence.

Cotton's methods were not new, and also that the practise of extracting infected teeth, or removing infected tonsils, would not prove a cure for all mental disorders. Says this paper:

"Dr. Carlos F. MacDonald, who is well known as an alienist, cited other 'discoveries' that had come to light in the last forty years. He mentioned particularly the 'blue-glass craze,' which led to the glazing of the windows of hospitals with blue-colored panes. The patients were allowed to sit under the influence of the bluish light, which, it was contended, brought about remarkable cures.

"He also referred to the idea that music worked wonderful cures among insane people, and also to the alienist in California who announced six or eight years ago that he had discovered a cure for all cases of dementia præcox.

"We are practically prepared to state that this infection originates in the teeth, as we find the same organism in the abscessed teeth, tonsils, stomach, and duodenum, and in no case have we been able to eliminate the teeth as the origin of the infection. We have had five acute maniacal cases who died within a short time after coming to the hospital. Formerly the cause of death was considered due to exhaustion from excitement, but a bacteriological study in these cases showed all the organs practically infected. We feel that we have established a very important fact as applicable to general medicine as to nervous and mental diseases, that is, that the infection originates in the teeth, and after some years infects the organs through the lymphatic system.

In making routine examinations of the blood we found a great number of our patients who gave a positive reaction, showing that they were suffering from a chronic infection. At first the teeth and tonsils were thoroughly investigated. In many cases the infected teeth were extracted, producing gratifying results in some cases, but in the majority no improvement was noted. Some twenty-two of these cases had their infected tonsils removed, and again we noted a marked improvement and even recovery in one-half of these cases. The next point of attack was the gastro-intestinal tract, for many of the patients showed evidence of a chronic gastro-intestinal infection. Finally, in April of the present year we were able to utilize a method of accurately determining the infection of the stomach and duodenum by making direct cultures from these organisms."

Dr. Cotton describes several causes of infected teeth, such as bad dental work, neglect, and in some cases infection inherited from parents. He recommends a campaign of education so that physicians, dentists, and the public at large would realize the danger of infected teeth, not only in producing nervous and mental diseases, but in undermining the general health. According to a report in the Newark Evening News, he also expresses the belief that infection as the result of kissing and using the same eating utensils is not only possible, but is extremely probable, in a great many cases of this type. Alienists interviewed by the New York Evening Post were inclined to believe that Dr.

"We all know,' Dr. MacDonald said, 'that a certain number of cases result from infection, from toxic poisoning, from the teeth, the tonsils, or intestinal or septic conditions in other bodily organs. Those conditions can be cured, and a certain number of these cases may recover. The general profession and the alienists, however, will desire, before accepting the new method, that it should stand the test of time.

"I do not anticipate any large increase in the percentage of recoveries of those suffering from mind-disorders as a result of this method, which is not new. It is simply the cardinal principle that is invariably followed in treating mental, as well as bodily, ailments -that of locating the source or cause of the trouble, and removing it.'

"Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe said that the reported cure was a minute and comparatively insignificant phase of treating persons suffering from mental disorders. The physician added that the method was not new and had been known some time.

"Dr. Jelliffe, however, was careful to point out that if it were assumed that every mental disorder was due to infected teeth, infected tonsils, or infected intestines, and the teeth were extracted promiscuously or the tonsils removed, it would prove a dangerous treatment, because many cases of mental illness and disorders were the direct results of decidedly different causes, such, for instance, as alcoholism or cancer of the brain.

On the other hand, said Dr. Jelliffe, if it were suspected that mer tal disorder did result from infected teeth or infected tonsils, it would be well for the physician to ascertain this carefully before removing the suspected causes."

The writer of an editorial in the New York Tribune is of opinion that Dr. Cotton's work is of larger significance than bis critics have seemed to realize. We read:

"He endeavors to show that most mental disturbances have a physical or pathological base; the influence of bad teeth is only one. Infected tonsils and throats, intestinal disturbances, and, in point of fact, almost any of the chronic infections may be the direct cause of a great number of psychic disorders. What is new in the work at the New Jersey hospital is that careful clinical and laboratory examinations are of great value in revealing the cause and indicating the treatment in a large number of cases, even some acute cases. The teeth and the tonsils have an especial importance because they seem especially prone to these chronic infections; and where such infection was evident it has been found that removal of the one or the other has had striking results.

"This appears to be equally true following treatment of the chronic gastro-intestinal disturbances. It is very well known, for example, that there are 'carriers' of typhoid and other diseases who maintain a fair degree of health, tho the infection may subsist for years. It is also well known that in the treatment of chronic rheumatism removal of the teeth or the tonsils often has excellent effect. If these mild focal infections, as they are known, can poison the whole body, even to the tips of the fingers, they can likewise poison the cells of the brain and set up equal disturbances there. And from these certain types of insanity may result."

IL the statue of Edwin Booth was unveiled ercy Park, on November 13, had an actor nonored in New York. The same thing was go of London when a statue of Henry Irving the National Gallery. This statement overShakespeare was an actor, but the monumental pon him were of course for reasons aside from nce upon the stage. That alone would have nored, and the New York Evening Post thinks taken as a discredit to New York that she has ore finding the one man worthy of this honor. erican actors could be nominated?" it venany might be lightly named," it adds, "but atue is an act to the seriousness of which the ning to awaken." Therefore:

t, or Puritan prejudice, or some other cause thanked by Melpomene and Thalia that our not a litter of statues of little-known actors. tatue is unquestioned. But those who paid y should have been the last to fail to be glad not been cheapened."

emorates "the greatest Hamlet the American " and was erected by a committee of the h Edwin Booth founded and endowed for llow actors. In the dedication address by thews, of Columbia, reported by the New uch tribute as this was paid:

ide in our membership in the Players have hour when the founder handed us the deed the fire which still burns brightly on our him a debt we could never pay, a debt not hen gave us, the house with its furnishings,

its books, and its paintings, not merely for the kindly feelings which have prompted his liberality, but also and especially for the wisdom with which he established our prosperity upon a solid foundation. He was an actor; he loved his profession, and he wanted to testify to this love. He meant the Players to be a home for the actor first of all, for the dramatist and for the manager, that the men of his own calling might mingle at ease. But he knew that it was not good for the members of any one profession to fellowship exclusively with one another. He wanted the men of the theater to associate with men of letters and with artists, painters, sculptors, and architects. He held that

All arts are one, all branches of one tree.
All fingers, as it were, of one hand.

And he designed this house of ours to be a haven for the practitioner of all the allied arts.

"Now at last, more than a score of years since he was taken from us, we have been enabled to erect this statue as an outward and visible sign of our gratitude and our affection. It is placed here in the little open space he loved to look down on from the room where he lived the last years of his life and where he died. It has been modeled by one of our own members with a fidelity which all who knew Edwin Booth can appreciate and with a beauty to be recognized by those who never had the privilege of beholding him.

"Edwin Booth was a born actor, inheriting the divine gift from the father whose memory he ever revered. He was an untiring student of his art, knowing how and why he got his effects. By his skill and his sincerity he was able to disguise the artificiality of 'Richelieu' and 'The Fool's Revenge.' I can recall the thrill with which-not so far from threescore years ago I first heard Richelieu threaten to launch 'the curse of Rome'; and I have never forgotten the shiver that shook me when I later beheld the demoniac dance of Bertuccio when he believes that at last he is revenged on his enemy.

"But like his great predecessors, with whose achievements he has admiringly familiarized himself, Edwin Booth found most pleasure in acting the greatest parts, those that Shakespeare

had filled with fire-Iago and Othello, Brutus and Macbeth, Shylock and Hamlet. Here in New York more than half a century ago he acted Hamlet for one hundred consecutive performances, a longer run than any Shakespearian play had ever had in any city in the world.

"We may apply to Edwin Booth the praise given to Shakespeare as an actor by a contemporary-he was excellent in the quality he profest. In founding the Players he built himself a monument more enduring than bronze; and now we have set up this enduring bronze, to stand here through the years and to bear witness that he saw the Players well bestowed."

T

PRAISE FOR AMERICAN POETS

HE POETIC IMPULSE in America has not grown like the humble violet. So many voices have trumpeted it from the housetops that even friendly souls might be pardoned the fear that it was only American buncombe. But the noise has waked up the London Saturday Review, and one rubs one's eyes to see the organ so full of historic scorn of American literature printing the words of a writer signed "W. Bryher" to the effect that "America is producing book after book of fresh and exultant vision, young as any Elizabethan, just as definitely original." We needn't quote the accompanying disparaging sentences referring to England's present product, of which a high opinion prevails here, but pass on to words that will help our insurgent school to bear the whips and scorns of time. "Vividness, vitality, and concentration, beauty and originality of expression, if these are the essentials of modern poetry, look for them in the work of Amy Lowell, 'H. D.,' John Gould Fletcher, Sandburg, Frost, and many another writer." He puts a crucial question:

"What have we to put beside their strength, the audacity of their richness, but an apathy born of outworn tradition, some expression of a past we so imperfectly explore? It is not an hour for laughter, for indifference; the books are there, there is no barrier of language. Truly the time is ripe for a rediscovery of America."

Leaving the question unanswered, he turns to inquire into "the tendencies which have startled American poetry into so sudden and virile a realization of loveliness, so true and individual an expression of life":

"Partly it is due to the varied roots from which these new impulses are derived. Miss Lowell owes much to her French reading. 'H. D.' is unmistakably Greek

the honey-seeking, golden-banded, the yellow swarm

was not more fleet than I

(spare us from loveliness), And I fell prostrate

crying:

'You have flayed us

with your blossoms,

spare us the beauty

of fruit trees.'

Yet her poetry, visible essence of beauty as it is, is never thin with it, never quiescent, but forceful with life; so poignant with suggestion only with long association may its meaning grow into the mind.

"It is a different world, indeed, we come to in 'Irradiations' or in any book by John Gould Fletcher. He touches all modernity, loves it, and pours it into his pages, tumultuous as the cloud shadows over uneven mountains he delights to describe. It is true his poems suffer a little from exuberance, are sometimes confused, yet how he has captured not only the sea but the whole rough atmosphere of a dying period and comprest it into the four pages of 'Clipper Ships'! Perhaps his most definite contribution to the new movement in poetry lies in his expression of a personal mood seen with the imaginative eyes of a changing day, as in the following lines:

in form and thought, the literature of many countries unites in Fletcher; with Sandburg Swedish ancestry mingles with American experience. But the essentials are, as Miss Lowell has stated in her book, "Tendencies in Modern American Poetry,' 'a rediscovery of beauty in our modern world, and the originality and the honesty to affirm that beauty in whatever manner is native to the poet.'

"Pursuit of absolute loveliness, to concentrate the heart of it into a sharp and polished arrowhead, to renew modernity yet be untainted by it, these are the characteristics of 'Sea Garden,' by 'H. D.,' the salt wind, a handful of honey, drift-shells, and broken petals a world built of these, so vibrant with beauty that wonder must tremble on fear, as in this verse from 'Orchard":

I saw the first pear

as it fell

The trees, like great jade elephants,

Chained, stamp, and shake 'neath the gadflies
of the breeze,

The trees lunge and plunge, unruly elephants:
The clouds are their crimson howdah canopies,
The sunlight glints like the golden robe of a Shab.
Would I were tossed on the wrinkled backs of
these trees.

"It has been truly said that 'Chicago Poems,' by Carl Sandburg, is 'one of the most original books the age has produced.' Certainly the poet has stamped his individuality on every page of the volume. Yet the essentials of his poetry are tenderness, the freedom of youth; he is passionate with humanity. Has he not put himself into his poem, 'Young Sea"? The sea is never still,

It pounds on the shore,
Restless as a young heart
Hunting.

Youth, torn with desire to pour exultant
joy into the world, careless if it waste,
and blind to the knowlege there are some
hearts beauty will never nest in. That his
vision is often limited, his perspective
faulty, can not obscure the true and virile
loveliness of these poems."

Miss Lowell gets the palm from this writer as "the most original poet of the new movement." He finds:

"In her poetry is reborn that rich freshness, that exultant vitality robbed from literature too many centuries ago. Poetry, and prose as well, for her 'Tendencies in Modern American Poetry' is full, even for Miss Lowell, of true and unexpected phrases, is a vivid appreciation of the differing work and personality of several poets; the history of a movement that may well become a dominating influence in future expression. In her books achievement is breaking into flower. To read a sentence, a fragment of a poem, is to surrender to its vividness. is to feel beauty blown into life, rare with enthusiasm, original with expression. But here is a verse from one of the loveliest of her poems, 'Venus Transiens':

Tell me

Was Venus more beautiful
Than you are,

When she topped
The crinkled waves,
Drifting shorewards
On her plaited shell?

Was Botticelli's vision

Fairer than mine;

And were the painted rosebuds

He tossed his lady,

Of better worth

Than the words I blow about you

To cover your too great loveliness As with a gauze

Of misted silver?

"The work of Robert Frost is already known in England, two volumes of his work being first published here. He draws near painting in his actual transcription of incidents, seldom abandoned to imaginative vision, but, sure, vital, a poet of realism. He breathes of the soil he has described so lovingly, gets the feel of things into his verses, apples, the bend of birches, the blueberries tarnished with wind."

One paragraph, the final one, places what the writer imagines as the contrast between the poetic impulses of the mother country of the tongue and the younger one of the West:

"I want vividness, I want life; is this too much to require of a poem? Original use of traditional meter, unexpected loveliness of cadence, what matters it so on the verse be stamped the definite personality of the poet in an idiom peculiar to himself? I will tolerate any experiment; I can not tolerate mediocrity. I am no partizan of arid learning, but is not wideness a necessity; that the Elizabethans be studied side by side with the Greeks, that Walt Whitman and the French development of the past fifty years be read together. It is because this knowledge is sought so turally by American writers, because they explore the past, yet put their strength into the future, their books are full of that freshness, even in maturity, the Elizabethans made their own. True, there are signs in England transition is near to ending, yet poetical impulse is indolent as a young bee that will not break the wax of fettering thought. The apathy will be rent; we, also, shall share the future, but, meantime, it would not hurt us to rediscover enthusiasm, experiment, and America."

na

T

TOLSTOY STILL DREAMING

HE TOLSTOYAN SPIRIT is still alive in his son "with all its uncompromising idealism and disregard of practical realities," says a Stockholm correspondent of the London Times. He has lately seen the present Count Tolstoy, who, until the Russian revolution began to develop into its Bolshevist forms, was one of its enthusiastic supporters. He is now pictured as a disillusioned refugee as he arrived in Sweden, having left his country in despair of being able to aid her at present. The correspondent gives this account of him:

1854-55

11TH SEASON, MANAGER,

1864-65.

32D WEEK. MR. WILLIAM STUART.

England, the writer avers, never more vividly desired beauty, and he wonders "why mediocrity is the usual answer to its needs." He thinks, perhaps, that "the neglect of wide reading is a partial reason for this failure, particularly among the younger writers":

"To read a dozen poets is to be hampered by tradition, to echo their idiom, their thought; to read a hundred is to find individuality, the power to fashion this to words. Experience and study as well as largeness of vision are essential to expression, rather than this modern tendency to acclaim boys who, perceiving for the first time a sunset is beautiful, take pen in hand and rime anew impressions which have reached them through the pages of Keats or Swinburne. An age which encourages this can not expect vitality of inspiration, for, unwelcome as this truth may be, a poet must learn his trade."

"Count Leo Tolstoy, who is married to a Swedish lady, has been living in Petrograd since his return from a lecturing tour in America, Canada, and the Far East, where he spoke of Russia, proclaiming his father's doctrines of peace and good will, the unity of nations, and mutual help. On his return to Russia he founded a newspaper, the Vestotchka, for propagating some theories which he believed would be congenial to the Bolshevists. He very soon discovered his mistake; then Bolshevist exclusiveness put an end to his enterprise. His paper was supprest, his friends and employees were arrested or driven to flight, and he himself was branded as an antirevolutionary, and obliged to take refuge in concealment till he was able to obtain a passage on a Swedish steamer and to join his family in Sweden."

His résumé of the situation was that "the Socialist experiment is ruining Russia." For"The country is being reduced to a wilderness, thanks to Bolshevist terrorism. It has become the theater of the greatest amount of suffering the world has ever known. There are doubtless some good things in Bolshevist theories of equality, self-reliance, and the rest, but in practise they have reduced them to the most egoistic, revolting brutality. Life is no longer possible under their tyranny and oppression. It is still only possible in the country, far from the towns and great centers.

"My mother is living at Yasnaya Polyana, and able to lead a comparatively quiet life. All her relatives have taken refuge on the estate. They are closely watched and guarded, sharing all they have with the soldiery, but they are not molested. Russia must and will emerge from this nightmare. What the Russia of the future will be no one can tell, probably something quite different from the Russia of the past. All we can do toward shaping that future must be to inculcate the love of unity and freedom among the people and fraternity among all nations."

The correspondent here is apparently mistaken as to the identity of the particular son of Count Tolstoy who gave this account. A recent letter to the New York Times from Count Ilya Tolstoy makes it evident that the one now in Sweden is the eldest son, Sergius. Count Ilya's letter completes the picture