Medicine: Mechanical Larynx

Senator Thomas Coleman du Pont of Delaware, last week invalid at the Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital, has had his vocal cords cut out. But he will be able to speak by means of a mechanical larynx.

Senator du Font’s throat was diseased from a “throat ulcer.” For this he consulted Dr. John E. Mackenty, senior surgeon at the Manhattan hospital, who is famed for his technique in operations on cancer of the throat. Dr. Mackenty excised Senator du Pont’s vocal cords, larynx and part of his tongue and windpipe. So that the senator could breathe, Dr. Mackenty cut a hole in the front wall of his neck and to it fastened the upper rim of his windpipe.

Similar operations have been done on about 600 U. S. people now living. They respire through their throat opening. To prevent inhaling of dust and dirt, the hole is screened with gauze which a soft rubber ring holds in place.

Those people are dumb, for they lack vocal.cords. The vocal cords are two short bands of muscles that cross the larynx. In breathing air passes between the cords. To make sounds, the cords assume varying tensions; the passing air makes them vibrate; vowel sounds result: the palate acts as a sounding board, the mouth as a resonance chamber. In talking the palate, tongue, teeth and lips modify vocal sounds into speech.

To enable such voiceless people to speak, Dr. Mackenty, at the Vanderbilt Clinic, Manhattan, early in 1925 displayed a device made for him by Dr. Harvey Fletcher and Clarence E. Lane of the Western Electric-American Telephone & Telegraph laboratories. The apparatus consists of a small cylinder about the size of a man’s pipe bowl. From the bottom reaches a flexible rubber tube which at will is attached to the opening in the cripple’s throat. From the top extends a pipe stem, intended to bs held deep in the mouth. The cylinder contains a vibrating diaphram of rubber. As air is breathed over this diaphragm a sound results; moving tongue, lips, teeth and .palate alter such sound into syllables, words, talk. Enunciation is clear, although monotone.

*Starting from his discoveries, doctors are experimenting with malaria to treat tuberculosis. In the Leipzig Zeitschrift fur Tuberkulose, O. Weselko writes that the treatment is lasting. The body is made able to resist the tuberculosis germs. But in the London Journal of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene, M. Freiman writes that in districts where malaria is prevalent, patients apparently free from tuberculosis, often after they had contracted malaria, suddenly showed acute signs of tuberculosis. On the other hand, consumptives with malaria grew worse and often died.