Medicine: Powdered Stomach

The chief cause of pellagra is lack of nicotinic acid; the symptoms are bad skin, large sores, graying, falling hair, mental trouble and an enlarged, fatty liver. A good medicine for it is powdered hog’s stomach. But doctors also use yeast, liver and a good diet. The theory has been that pellagra has a mixture of causes (monotonous diet, lack of fresh food, etc.) and thus requires a mixture of treatments.

But Drs. Theodore and Joseph Gillman of Johannesburg, South Africa, now think that powdered stomach alone may be best. They reached this conclusion after experiments on 23 “non-European” children. The results were described in Archives of Internal Medicine.

Besides a liberal diet, which most of the little patients could not eat at first, seven of the children were fed vitamins (including nicotinic acid), seven were given liver extract, nine were given Ventriculin (a commercial powdered-stomach preparation). Result: all the children on vitamins died sooner than they would have on no treatment at all; five of those on liver slowly recovered and two died; all nine of the ones who were fed powdered stomach “could be regarded as cured within ten to 14 days.”

The Gillmans now look on vitamins with suspicion: they see no reason for thinking that a vitamin can repair damage that lack of the vitamin has caused. They think powdered stomach should be tried on other sometimes fatal diseases, e.g., coeliac disease and sprue, in which the liver and intestines do not process fat properly.