Medicine: Torrents of Spring

That young men turn both idle and fanciful in spring, and that young men are not the only ones, was a truism examined last week at a Manhattan medical celebration. At the opening of Mount Sinai Hospital’s enlarged department of physical therapy, Professor Henry Cuthbert Bazett of the University of Pennsylvania gave an explanation for this seasonal phenomenon. In spring, said Professor Bazett, a human being’s blood volume increases by a fifth to a third. He learned this fact by immuring himself in an air-conditioned laboratory for twelve days last winter. Outside it was sleety & cold; in the room the temperature was 90° during the day, 88° at night. Dr. Bazett’s first symptoms were typical of spring fever—laziness, sleepiness, a logy feeling. Then his ankles and feet began to swell. At the end of the first week he was drowsy, uncomfortable, mentally confused. But at the end of ten days he felt comfortable again, because his blood-making system had gone into action and made more than two extra pints of blood to cool his internal workings. His swollen ankles subsided, his mind woke up.

Spring engorgement is the result of a gradual heating of the body, said Dr. Bazett. And this heating-up may be considered the basic reason why people with weak brains tend to burst cerebral blood vessels in the spring, why people with weak hearts may collapse just as winter ends, why many who rush south to escape northern winters promptly die there.

Country people in England (where Dr. Bazett was born and educated) and around Philadelphia (where he teaches) still dose themselves and their children with sulfur & molasses (brimstone & treacle) every spring to thin their blood. In extreme cases they apply bloodsucking leeches. By the medical profession in general, bloodletting is considered even more out-of-date than doses of brimstone & treacle. Yet precisely such venesection, suggested modern Dr. Bazett. might be a helpful prophylactic against the blood torrents of spring.