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     THE tremendous strides in surgery within the past few years have lessened to a great extent the sufferings of the human race. Much has yet to be accomplished, but what remains to be done will be overtaken in a few years if science proceeds at the same rate as at present. Apropos of surgery, the death of Mr. McKinley would seem to have created no little stir in surgical circles. A correspondent, writing from New York, says:—Unless present indications prove false, President McKinley’s funeral will be followed by a controversy that will become celebrated in the annals of medicine. Little so far has been said openly, but suggestions and innuendoes concerning the attitude of this or that physician are frequent. Little attempt is made to conceal the fact that the majority of his colleagues are inclined to place the blame for the optimistic bulletins on Dr. McBurney, the famous New York surgeon, who was called into consultation three days after Mr. McKinley was shot. Dr. McBurney himself apparently believes that there is something in the theory that Czolgosz’s bullet was poisoned. “It looks suspicious,” he said. “In my experience I have never seen a wound in such a condition as that described in the report of the autopsy or made by an ordinary bullet. I am not prepared to state positively that the bullet was poisoned, and until a chemical analysis is made we shall not know. The suspicious thing is that, according to the reports, the gangrene followed the entire path of the bullet. In cutting the tissue of the stomach, for example, an ordinary wound might develop gangrene to some extent where the bullet went in, but if I understand the reports of the autopsy correctly, the gangrene was just as great in extent at the end of the wound as at the beginning. This is something no one can understand, assuming that the bullet was an ordinary one.”