President McKinley’s Death

     The reports from Buffalo just as we were going to press with the issue of September 13th indicated, much to our surprise, yet to our joy, that President McKinley was rapidly recovering—that surgically he was well, and that he then needed only some attentions from the physicians to insure his recovery. While yet—even with the revelations of the autopsy before us—we are not disposed to criticise the mistake in diagnosis and prognosis, we can but feel that had the patient been a tramp in one of our up-to-date surgical clinics, where the reputation of the surgeon was at stake, freer investigations as to the track of the pistol ball would have been made, and a more correct diagnosis resulted. With the lights before them, we believe that the eminent surgeons in the case did the best they could have done under the circumstances. And yet in our sorrow over the loss of the great and good man from the presidential chair, the remark of the old darkie who had just lost his wife forces itself upon us: “I have no doubt, doctor, but that you have done the best you knowed how; but God knows you didn’t know much.”