Medicine: June Meetings

An 81-year-old Philadelphia Italian who applied to the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate Hospital for doctoring seemed to have syphilis. Interne Sebron C. Dale stooped to take a sample of blood for a Wassermann test. Screaming “they steal my blood!” the old man whipped a razor from the folds of his bedclothes, slashed young Dr. Dale across the throat, severed his windpipe, vocal cords, jugular vein, carotid artery, muscles, nerves. The razor blade broke off in Dr. Dale’s collar bone. He staggered to a surgical dressing room where he fell unconscious. Another interne quick-wittedly applied clamps to the spurting blood vessels, yelled lustily for help. Surgeons came running and in emergency performed a repair job which last week, 18 months after the event, was one of the excitements of the convention of the American Laryngological Association in Atlantic City.

All internes know what type their blood is, so there was not an instant’s delay in getting dying Dr. Dale a blood transfusion. As soon as he began to breathe again and air bubbled and wheezed through his slit throat, experts in the extra-fine art of blood-vessel surgery removed the bone-embedded blade, sewed the arteries and veins together, laced the ends of nerves, took tiny stitches in the vocal cords, bigger ones in the windpipe, muscles and skin. Last week the only signs, of the incident were a scar across Dr. Dale’s neck, a twist to his lip when he smiled.

A brand-new organization heartily condemned as unnecessary by the American Medical Association, the American College of Surgeons and the American Surgical Association is the U. S. branch of the International College of Surgeons, composed of specialists who want a special place under the surgical floodlight denied to them by the older organizations. Last week the I. C. S. met in Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria immediately before the A. S. A. met in the same hotel, and made more news.

Item: President André Crotti of the I. C. S., a Columbus, Ohio surgeon, declared that goitre is usually caused, not by lack of iodine, but by toxins produced by a fungus which grows on cabbages. As proof of this etiology, Dr. Crotti said he had: 1) found a specific fungus in goitres removed from humans; 2) found the same fungus in the water supply of areas where goitre was common; 3) produced goitre in dogs by feeding them cultures of this fungus; 4) found the same fungus in cabbage; 5) produced goitre in rabbits by feeding them cultures of the cabbage fungus; 6) fed iodine to the rabbits and demonstrated that it did not prevent growth of the goitre.

The American Society of Clinical Pathologists meeting in Philadelphia produced more useful news than usual.

Item: Convulsions (eclampsia) which occur during childbirth are due to fat (cholesterol) in the mother’s blood, announced Drs. Henry F. Hunt, William B. Patterson & Roy E. Nicodemus of Danville, Pa. The fat causes the placenta to degenerate and produce toxins which the woman absorbs. The fat, in turn, is due to under-functioning of the thyroid and that is due to the abnormal burdens which pregnancy places on a woman. On the basis of their experiences with animals, the Danville doctors give thyroid extracts to local women who fear convulsions, but they “are not ready to report their results.”

Day after Dr. Hunt made this report, a severe attack of hemorrhoids sent him to bed to recuperate for the Atlantic City meeting of the A. M. A. this week where he was to report another discovery: that intravenous injection of dead typhoid germs cures undulant (goat) fever.

Item: Dr. Jack Norris of Atlanta “read in the newspapers” that a murderer poisoned his victim by dropping strychnine in his cocktails. He tried the mixture on dogs, killed them in 30 minutes, advised the pathologists: “Corn whiskey and strychnine should never be taken during the same period either by prescription or through ignorance, for each appears to heighten the toxic effect of the other.

Item: Dr. Merlin Joe Kilbury of Little Rock, Ark. saw a local woman’s lumpy breast cut off on suspicion of cancer, found that the lumps were due to tularemia (acquired by handling diseased rabbits), first case of tularemia of the human breast ever reported to science.

The American Academy of Pediatrics could not agree on the values of injections against whooping cough and scarlet fever. Whooping cough vaccine seems to mitigate the severity of the disease without preventing it. Scarlet fever inoculations prevent the rash, but not always sore throats and swollen glands.