Medicine: Seasickness Pills

People who do not get seasick find seasickness uproariously funny. People who do get seasick want to die. Wit is no longer witty, companionship no longer desirable. They want to be alone. Then they want something to hang on to while they go through the misery of turning themselves inside out. When they are convalescent, they feel at peace. But sometimes it takes a long time to convalesce.

About 40% of those who go to sea are thus afflicted. Even some admirals get seasick. To these unfortunates, last fortnight’s announcement that the Canadian Navy has an antiseasickness capsule that works 75% of the time brought a ground swell of joy.

The capsule is the result of two years of work by Surgeon Captain Charles Herbert Best, codiscoverer of insulin, and Dr. Wilder Graves Penfield, director of the Montreal Neurological Institute. Using a double-ended swinging machine designed to make even sailors seasick (TIME, July 19), they first tested 60 antiseasickness compounds, found two which had a slight effect separately, a better effect together. They added another compound that was their own idea, colored the mixture pink for the psychological effect, put the stuff up in capsules to be taken every eight hours until sea legs are attained.

They tested the capsules on 1,000 sailors at sea. Of those who got no medicine, 30% became seasick; of those who got fake capsules, 13% became seasick; of those who got the new pink capsules, only 6% became seasick. So the Canadian Navy is issuing the capsules to its personnel, the Army is getting them for invasion and airborne troops. As yet, nobody knows exactly how the pink pills work.