Baltimore Evening Sun (14 November 1913): 6.

Down in Savannah, in “dry” Georgia, Mayor Davant has just issued an order requiring the speak-easies and blind pigs to close on Sunday! But the estimable Savannah Morning News of November 11 denies the rumor that he is going to prohibit the open display of bottles in these joints. Georgia’s constitutional prohibition does not run in Savannah. The people of that city frankly refuse to pay any attention to it.

A DAILY THOUGHT.
Bigotry has no head and cannot think, no heart and cannot feel. * * * Her prayers are curses, her God is a demon, her communion is death.—Daniel O’Connell.

Dr. Joseph C. Bloodgood’s cancer figures, given out in Chicagi last night, are still incomplete, but already they offer overwhelming testimany to the value of prompt and radical surgery. The one sure way to deal with a cancer is to out it out, and the sooner that course is adopted the better. At the start the patient’s chances of cure are practically 100 per cent., but day by day they keep on falling, and after awhile they are next to nothing, Nine-tenths of the persons who are dying of cancer today might have been saved by early surgery. Even in the most malignant forms at breast cancer, Dr. Bloodgood shows that prompt and radical operation means 85 per cent. of cures.

Of the accuracy of Dr. Bloodgood’s figures there can be no question. They are based upon the records of Dr. Halsted’s clinic at the Johns Hopkins, Dr. Finney’s clinic at the Union Protestant Infirmary, and Dr. Bloodgood’s cases at St. Agnes’ and elsewhere. To track down the patients listed upon these records was a labor of enormous tediousness, but Dr. Bloodgood and his associates successfully accomplished it. The resultant figures are well worth the trouble. They introduce a bright ray of hope into a dark place. They show beyond a doubt that, even if cancer is still incurable, it may at least be prevented.

But the business of prevention is chiefly a business of wariness. In other words, the important thing is to recognize the cancer early, or, better still, to recognize the so-called pre-cancerous lesion–i. e., the growth or sore preceding the actual cancer. Here, it is plain, the responsibility lies upon the patient himself. He must learn to be suspicious of all sores that do not heal promptly, and of all tumors in the cancer areas, and of all warts and moles that are subject to irritation, and he must submit them to skillful inspection at once. In 999 cases out of 1,000, perhaps, they will turn out to be harmless--but the one, way to prevent cancer is to get that one thousandth case in time.

The Rev. Dr. Theodore Clinton Foote to Dr. Goldsborough:

It is no pleasure for us to punish men–to see them suffer.

That is to say, if “us” means only the rev. doctor and his friends. But what of the snouters and smuthounds of the Pentz Society? What of the virginal suffragettes? What of all the rest of the Mohammedans?

Inaccurate statement in this place yesterday:

The News is the local press agent for the Marmola prescription for obesity, which was denounced by the American Medical Association on October 16, 1909.

My apologies to The Evening Sun: it now shares the News’ post of honor. In yesterday’s issue it printed the Marmola advertisement not 10 inches from the place where my inept and ill-advised remarks appeared. That advertisement was headed “Good News From Paris,” and from it I extract the following:

A news film from Paris informs us that the American method of producing a slim, trim figure is meeting with astonishing success. This system, which made such a wonderful impression over there, must be the Marmola Prescription Tablet method of reducing fat.

And so on and so on. In brief, plain lying--and helped out by the editorial “we.” In the same issue The Evening Sun printed two columns on “Maryland’s Need of New Penal Legislation”!

The roaring old maids of the Maryland Anti-Vivisection Society are sending out a request to the local clergy to preach against animal experimentation on December 7, the Sunday before the great anti-vivisectionist campmeeting opens in Washington. Will any of the good friars respond? I make no doubt that some of them will. There are preachers in this town who will do anything, however idiotic, to get their names into the newspapers. They are in favor of all the new isms. They are in the forefront of the uplift. They are the stars of our pulpit vaudeville.

As an aid to these assiduous comedians of the cloth let me commend the immortal work of their brother and bishop, the Rev. Dr. J. Todd Ferrier: “Vivisection: an Enquiry into its Real Nature.” This imbecile pamphlet may be had free of charge on application to the Maryland Anti-Vivisection Society. It preaches the doctrine thal dogs and cats have souls, and that “once upon the Human Kingdom they dwelt as Human Children.” In other words, Ferrier argues that all such animals are the descendants of human beings, and that their present state is due to a process of devolution. Says he:

The Golden Age passed away. The Gods slept. Psyche fell a prey to the betrayor and went down into the most cruel bondage. All of the planes of the Planet became changed. One by one the various Orders of life went down. The whole of the Human Races were one by one drawn from the Human Kingdom; and though many of them rose, and fell again, and rose again, yet there were those which are unable to rise up to rise up on to the Human Kingdom after the last descent; and of these were the Souls now in the Dog and Horse.

Such is the childish nonsense distributed in Batimore by the Maryland Anti-Visecection Society, an organization which has the impudence to claim that Cardinal Gibbons is one of its supporters. Is his Eminence aware that it is using a letter from him as a certificate of character? Certainly that letter, if it is genuine, was written under a misapprehension of the aims of the society. It to inconceivable that Cardinal Gibbons, or any other man of his intelligence, would give any encouragement, however remotely, to the dissemination of the proposterous balderdash of such asses as the Rev. Dr. J. Todd Ferrier.

New novels that insult the intelligence somewhat less than the average:

“Van Cleve,” by Mary H. Watts (Macmillan). “Youth’s Encounter,” by Compton Mackenzie (Doran). “Thorley Weir,” by E. F. Benson (Lippincott).

Boil your drinking water! Watch Anderson come back! Wait for the big show at Annapolis!