Medicine: Shot Without Pain

A painless substitute for the hypodermic needle was reported last week. The revolutionary gadget, called the “hypospray,” is a kind of air gun that shoots an injection under the skin in a spray so fine that the patient usually does not feel it.

The wonder was that no one had thought of it before. Its originator (an engineer) got the idea when an accidental explosion embedded oil droplets in a victim’s flesh without marking his skin. The implement was later perfected by a group at R. P. Scherfer Corp., Detroit.

The hypospray blasts a drug through the pores, using air pressure of 25 to 125 pounds per square inch. The gun opening of the instrument is one-fiftieth of the diameter of the finest hypodermic needle. Each injection is loaded in a cartridge. Doctors who have tested it think it will be just the thing for insulin, penicillin, vaccines and a variety of other injections.

Georgetown University’s Dr. Edward B. Tuohy, who exhibited the hypospray at a Washington meeting last fortnight, foresaw a crop of new whodunit plots: “Why, with this gun someone could readily substitute poison for insulin, shoot his victim by pressing the hypospray gun against him in a crowd, and . . . the victim wouldn’t know he’d been hit. . . .”