Medicine: Cantonese Miracle

Radium is so precious therapeutically and so expensive that when a hospital loses its bit the loss stirs the community. Canton, Ohio, was thus excited last week by the disappearance of a quarter-inch tube of radium worth $5,000, at Aultman Hospital. Hospital officials sent for Professor Samuel James Mclntosh Allen of the University of Cincinnati to help them find it.

For Ohio’s Cantonese, Professor Allen did a miracle. He brought with him an instrument which consisted of an ebonite stick to which were fastened two slips of gold leaf. It was an electroscope. This electroscope he rubbed with a piece of cat’s fur and slowly waved over the hospital’s cinder heap. By and by the gold leaf dropped. Professor Allen immediately sifted the indicated cinders and with a forceps picked up the lost tube of radium. It had been thrown into the furnace with dirty bandages, as he had suspected.

The miracle was, of course, plain physics, which has been used dozens of times to find lost radium. When Professor Allen rubbed his electroscope with the cat’s fur he charged it with static electricity. Because radium gives off rays with electrical characteristics, when the electroscope approached the radium among the cinders, the rays affected the electrically charged gold leaf. Naturally, they separated.