Medicine: Embattled Neurologists

As they wandered over the sunny terrace and tranquil lawns of the Westchester Country Club at Rye, N. Y. last week, 200 members of the American Neurological Association talked more of the world’s madness than of their brainsick patients. Some older men recalled apprentice days in World War I, which provided cracked skulls and shattered brains from which the modern science of neurosurgery was learned. Almost all of them soberly discussed the chances of trying their skill on a mass scale once again.

To the layman, there was something decidedly vulture-like in such a view. The neurologists’ retiring president, Foster Kennedy, pitched into this airy position on other grounds.

Irish-born Dr. Kennedy, head of the Neurological Department of Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital, served four years with the British Army in World War I, is a cousin of Lieut. General Sir John Greer Dill, Chief of Staff of the British Army. In a florid, passionate speech on “Science, Civilization and Faith,” he lashed out at a group of 500 eminent scientists, headed by Physicist Arthur Holly Compton of Chicage, who had sent a “peace resolution” to President Roosevelt.

Said Dr. Kennedy: “These esoteric but good little boys of science said pompously the truism that war is out of harmony with the rational spirit and with the objective methods of science. . . . What do they mean by ‘objective’? Science can more easily be objective today in Pasadena than on a Belgian road under machine guns and the objectivity of science in Leipzig today exists in the exact proportion of the usefulness of that science to the National Socialist Administration. . . .

“Science can be no cloistered or fugitive thing. It cannot sit cowering in its laboratory while freedom dies. … It must have highhearted ways and be ashamed of priggish petitions from its children to the President of this country saying that because, forsooth, they are scientists they are above the battle and addicted to the higher life. These men showed themselves in that action the gadgeteers of science.”-Hot on Dr. Kennedy’s smoking heels, the convention unanimously passed a resolution asking the U. S. to give “credit, supplies and armaments” to the Allies.

“Rid at last,”said the resolution, “of the delusion of security through neutrality, we recognize that the German National Socialist system is our enemy … we face the fact that we are now in a state of opposition to the German National Socialist system, which . . . seeks to destroy our system of society and government.”

-The resolution had riot actually used such terms; it recommended “Wholehearted and unceasing support of all reasonable programs which seek a better understanding of the causes of war and which will preserve peace for the United States and bring peace to the world.” Several of those who signed it before the invasion of Holland and Belgium have since retracted.