Medicine: Poison-Ivy Cure

Two soldiers discreetly retreated when a strangely dressed figure emerged from the woods near Fort McPherson, Ga. Clad in heavy garments, with goggles and big asbestos gloves, he toted a bulging burlap sack. Even technicians at the fort’s medical laboratory shrank back. “Unclean, unclean,” said one of them. “Phooey,” replied Sergeant Seymour Shapiro. From his sack he pulled one of the long, leafy, hairy-stemmed vines of poison ivy he had been gathering, cut the vine into 3-ft. lengths and hung the pieces in bundles, like curing tobacco, from the ceiling.

From dried poison-ivy leaves Sergeant Shapiro concocts a unique extract which cures ivy poisoning, cause of 15 to 30% of summer and fall casualties in Southern Army posts. The dried, crushed leaves are soaked in pure alcohol until it turns an intense green. This solution is then filtered, put up in 50 cc. (1⅔ oz.) bottles and shipped to Army camps throughout the Fourth Service Command (the Southeastern U.S.).

To cure an ivy-poisoned soldier, one-tenth of a cc. of the extract (diluted with one cc. of salt solution) is injected intramuscularly. Burning sensations vanish within two to 24 hours, all blistering within two to five days, and no hospitalization is needed. The average untreated case suffers from one to three weeks, often in a hospital. Sergeant Shapiro’s extract cannot prevent ivy poisoning; it desensitizes skin only after an attack. Applied externally, it produces a fine case of poison ivy itself.

Sergeant Shapiro, who before the war was a chemist for a New Jersey flavoring-extract firm, has already brewed 50,000 cc. of the poison-ivy inoculant—enough for half a million injections. But the extract is not his invention. It was developed by Colonel Sanford Williams French, a longtime Army doctor who commands the medical branch of the Fourth Service Command. French, one of the 40% of mankind who are relatively immune to poison ivy, can safely gather the plant barehanded. Sergeant Shapiro cannot. Paradoxically, he is one of the few individuals on whom the poison-ivy extract will not work. He has suffered five poison-ivy attacks this year.