Medicine: Polio and Nerves

Sometimes nerves, like pollarded willows or clipped adenoids, will spread and grow after pruning. The growth rate may be an eighth of an inch a day, or even faster. This fact has been the basis of infantile-paralysis treatments by Lieut. Commander Harvey Ellsworth Billig, Jr. and Physiologist Anthonie Van Harreveld of the California Institute of Technology.

Their first big success came in 1940, when they operated on a 16-year-old boy with a weak, wasted lower leg and foot. Through an incision in the calf, they crushed the nerve above the point where it was damaged. Two months later, motion and feeling began to return to the foot. Eventually the boy regained full power in all the affected muscles and his treated leg again measured the same as the other.

Last fortnight in Philadelphia, Lieut. Commander Billig showed the International College of Surgeons a startling new technique. He now does the operation bloodlessly, with an air-driven rivet gun with a specially rounded head. The gun is pressed against the skin and used to knead the nerves right through the flesh.

Altogether, about 500 patients have been treated in Los Angeles and 40 in Philadelphia, all of them paralyzed a year or more. Considering that any improvement in such cases is remarkable, results so far have been excellent.