Public Ledger

The number of "infallible" cures for rheumatism that have been announced has become a matter of joke. Our readers have doubtless seen the amusing list of a hundred or so of these specifics, professional and non-professional that has gone the rounds of the papers. Dr. Franz Heller has added one more to the catalogue, and that is ammonia, which he advocates enthusiastically in the Medizinische Presse, of Vienna. For several years he has been a sufferer from severe muscular rheumatism in the right shoulder: he had taken all the common anti-rheumatic remedies with but little alleviation, when he began to reason that in rheumatism, as in gout, there may be a uric acid diathesis; he thought that liquor ammonia, on account of its rapid volatilization, would be the remedy most readily absorbed, and the most prompt in action. He took one drop diluted with water, and felt immediately a complete relief from the pain, which had lasted for ten hours; he was now able to move freely the arm which, an instant before, he could scarcely bear to have touched. The remedy, he claims, has proved a positive cure in all recent cases of muscular rheumatism which have fallen under his observation, and these have been many. He also observed its effects in several cases of acute articular rheumatism, in two of which six drops sufficed to subdue the pain and swelling within a period of twenty-four hours. In one case of chronic rheumatism of a finger-joint, which had lasted for half a year, the simple administration of the ammonia completely dispelled the inflammation and pain in the joint within two days.