Medicine: Sodium Rhodanate

Professor Wilder Dwight Bancroft, 67-year-old Cornell University chemist, dislikes doctors as scientists. His immediate reason is that they refuse to concede that he has discovered an elixir of long life, a panacea for insomnia, alcoholism and sciatica, a preventive of “nervous breakdowns,” hardening of the arteries and common colds, a cure for manic depressive insanity and epilepsy.

Identity of his four-powered substance is sodium rhodanate, a crystallized compound of soda, sulphur and cyanide, otherwise called sodium thiocyanate.

Professor Bancroft’s thesis is that the thread-like nerve ends clot when exhausted by wakefulness or worry or poisoned by sedatives, hypnotics, narcotics, anesthetics or alcohol. He has indeed seen through microscopes drugged nerve ends turn dull, cloud and congeal like poached eggs. His contention is that sodium rhodanate dissolves the clots at the nerve ends, restores them to their natural consistency.

Secretly he dosed some drunkards arrested near the Cornell campus in Ithaca, N. Y. The dosed drunkards quickly recovered from attacks of delirium tremens, although they were not cured of their craving for drink.

Professor Bancroft believed that the chemical also kept rabbits from contracting coccidiosis and chickens from contracting infectious leukemia.

In March 1933 the American Chemical Society, of which he was 1919 president, gave Dr. Bancroft its prized Nichols Medal “for his work on the application of colloid chemistry to physiological problems, particularly insanity, in which he has advanced scientific proof that dementia and drug addiction are curable chemically.”

Last week as a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences Professor Bancroft had the ears of the nation when that tight little body of scientists met in Cleveland. He shouted an angry tirade against medical scientists who had long scoffed at his chemical conclusions. His philippic delighted the multitudinous foes of organized medicine. It supplied quacks with specious arguments for years to come. And in sober essence it pitted the chemist mind, which elaborates theories from a few invariable facts, against the medical mind, which accepts healing principles only after painstaking weighing of forever varying human factors.

Ignoring Medicine’s reasons, Professor Bancroft inveighed: “In the last 20 years, the probable length of human life has been materially increased, thanks to medical science, but the change is largely due to a decrease in deaths among infants and children. The average improvement for a man of 45 through medical advances is about two months.

“This is the important thing. The colloid chemist now steps in where medical men leave off. Sodium rhodanate will minimize the effects of worry and will decrease the effects of nervous breakdowns not caused by pathological conditions. This drug increases the resistance of the living organism to infection by inducing better health. Drugs of this type will not cure progressive lesions and sclerotic conditions; but they will retard the aging of the colloids of the body. . . .

“I predict that if every human being of 45 or over would take sodium rhodanate, there would be a minimum increase of life of two years.

“Now, there is no question that the medical profession as a whole is hostile to our point of view. No medical school or hospital, due to the attitude of those who should be the leaders, has shown any active or intelligent interest in our work. . . .

“Our answer to the medical profession is simple: It is up to them to clean house. From now on it is a fight to the finish between the medical profession and ourselves. There can be only one outcome to this contest. The medical profession will lose.

“We challenge the medical profession to make their tests of our treatment, with all experimental details released, on certain forms of alcoholism, insomnia and sciatica. These are selected because even a medical man should get good results the first time. . . .

“I know medical men say it would take 20 years to test our theory properly. I say it can be done in three months. Let the medical profession run fair tests with all details publicly released. It does not dare to make these tests because the results would show that we are right.”

Up jumped Dr. Torald Hermann Sollmann, 60, professor of pharmacology & materia medica and dean of Western Reserve University Medical School to sneer that Professor Bancroft’s experiments on rabbits and chickens were not sound. “How many of your associates are taking sodium rhodanate?” bantered Professor Francis Gano Benedict, 64, Carnegie Institution nutritionist.

Professor Bancroft: “There must be about 100 of us taking it for sleep. I have been taking it for two years, about a teaspoonful a week of a 10% solution. I now sleep quite normally, and my health and disposition are normal.”

Slyly commented Professor Anton Julius Carlson, University of Chicago physiologist, who is 59: “The problem is not one of prolonging life, but of finding some way of easing out old men like you and me. God knows we have plenty who are dead and don’t know it.”