Medicine: Chiropodists’ Centennial

Chiropodists’ Centennia

In the early 19th Century, itinerant U. S. barbers traveled from town to town, carrying bags of dirty knives, and even old steels from corsets, for paring customers’ corns. They usually charged 25¢ an operation, raised howls of pain from their victims. One day, while lounging around a hotel lobby, a lush-bearded young man from New Hampshire named Nehemiah Kenison met a Scotsman who had a new, painless method of removing corns. Instead of digging with a scalpel, he first softened the corn in acid, then carefully shelled it out with a dull bone blade.

Nehemiah Kenison knew a good business when he saw it. He examined the acid, went to Boston, where he set up an office opposite Old South Church. Nehemiah generously taught his trick to his sons and half a dozen relatives, who taught others. So began the science of chiropody in the U. S.

Today, although a few chiropodists practice in barbershops, chiropody is a highly respectable handmaiden of medi cine, requiring two years of college training, three or four years in one of six approved schools. Chiropodists like to be known as podiatrists because, to their horror, they are often confused with chiropractors.

Last week the National Association of Chiropodists (Podiatrists) met in Bos ton to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of their science. As chairman of the meeting they elected their beaming, balding host — old Nehemiah’s nephew, Harry, who practices in Boston. At the convention the chiropodists orated on the “romance” and “epochal” contributions of chiropody, the “divine discontent” of Nehemiah Kenison.

>Chiropody is most useful in caring for the feet of patients with advanced diabetes, who, because of poor circulation, are liable to foot infections, even gangrene. In 1928 famed Diabetes Specialist Elliott Proctor Joslin founded a foot clinic in Boston’s New England Deaconess Hospital, urged other large hospitals to do likewise. For valuable pioneering the convention last week made him an honorary member.

>Sufferers from athlete’s foot often have to throw out all their shoes, because they are breeding spots for the offending fungus. Last week Bernard Soep, a Boston industrial designer, demonstrated a new shoe sterilizer—an inexpensive ultraviolet bulb that can be plugged into an ordinary light socket, inserted into a shoe.

>The convention urged members to enroll in a volunteer chiropody corps to work for Army & Navy. The U. S. does not have an official podiatry corps attached to its armed forces. A plan for such a corps was recently turned down by the War Department for, said the convention darkly, “inexcusable reasons.”

>The bulk of chiropodic practice consists of corn trimming. Last week Podiatrists James S. Bowman and Robert E. Fowler of Temple University School reported a new way of removing corns by injection. They inject solutions of a bismuth compound or salt water or even sterile water around the margin of the corn, thus choking off the tiny blood vessels which feed it. After several injections, the corn dissolves. This treatment, they cautioned, is still in an experimental stage.