Medicine: Specialists’ Skin

Like Lady Macbeth, surgeons and x-ray specialists forever worry about their hands. Surgeons wring theirs to keep them supple, and pray that arthritis may never stiffen the joints. X-ray specialists search their hands for blemishes, and pray that x-ray burns may never compel an amputation.

To the thickening of the skin of their hands, caused by repeated exposure to x-rays, roentgenologists are reconciled. Upon the assurance of Mayo Clinicians many an x-ray man has ceased to wear heavy lead-filled rubber gloves and aprons as a positive shield against x-rays which, while harmless to the patient, might seriously injure the examiner. Mayo Clinicians assured the profession that ordinary leather gloves and plain clothing gave the x-ray technician all the protection he needed. Recently, however, Mayo radiologists tested their data, found themselves wrong and frankly recanted in the American Journal of Roentgenology. Not to leather gloves and plain clothing went credit for the fact that Mayo Clinicians had suffered no harm but to the unexpected ability of human beings to stand strong repeated doses of x-rays.

“Until a year ago, I would have been willing to endorse their statement,” exclaimed Professor Gottwald Schwarz, University of Vienna’s longtime radiologist. “. . . But accidentally I lately suffered a needle prick of the nail cuticle of my left index finger. This trifling injury gradually developed into an ulcer which today, after the lapse of one year, still does not show the least tendency toward healing.” Day & night Professor Schwarz asks himself: “Have I a cancer? Should I have the finger tip cut off?”

To Editor Lawrence Reynolds of the American Journal of Roentgenology he sent a picture of his forefinger and advice to colleagues that they use a long-handled wooden spoon to touch patients whom they examine by x-rays.

Dr. Reynolds published the woeful information last week, and accompanied it with hopeful advice from the head of the Albert Soiland Radiological Clinic of Los Angeles. Dr. Soiland, 61, has been using x-rays for 38 years. As a result the skin of his hands is thick and swollen. Hopeless of curing them, he long tried to soothe them with various ointments and lotions. Dr. Soiland sails yachts in his leisure time. Last year it dawned on him that his hands felt better after being doused in salt water. He at once experimented in his laboratory with wet salt dressings, found the benefits to his hands real. Pacific Ocean water seemed to do him more good than Atlantic water, which is less salty. “Now,” wrote he last week. “I frequently go to sleep with a pair of cotton gloves on my hands, with a little extra padding over the back and fingers, soaked with either sea water or normal saline solution.”