POISONING BY WOOD ALCOHOL.CASES OF DEATH AND BLINDNESS FROM COLUMBIAN SPIRITS AND OTHER METHYLATED PREPARATIONS.

(A.) PUBLISHED CASES OF WOOD-ALCOHOL POISONING.  The following tables, prepared by Dr. Buller, are practically complete to June, 1904. As previously stated, they furnish characteristic accounts of intoxication from various methylated drinks, as well as from inhalation of the vapor of methyl alcohol. That only two of these cases occurred in Europe points the moral so often urged in these papers; wherever a government permits the sale of "deodorized" wood alcohol (as in the case of Columbian spirits in the United States and standard wood spirits in Canada), the only effective safeguard against the ingestion of the poison is removed and the annual sacrifice to death and blindness will certainly continue. Either the manufacture and sale of "deodorized" wood spirit should be absolutely prohibited, or, as in Germany and Great Britain, an untaxed ethyl alcohol, rendered undrinkable by the addition of pyroligneous spirit, mineral oil, naphthalin or some other nauseous