Medicine: Cure for Skinheads?

For two patients who had trouble with the circulation in their legs and feet, Glasgow’s Dr. John Kelvin prescribed a drug (Roniacol) that is supposed to open the arteries far from the heart. After they had taken four tablets a day for two months, the patients—who had both been bald—reported that they had grown fine heads of hair.

Reporting what he called a “hair-raising phenomenon” to the British Medical Journal, Dr. Kelvin simply passed on one ex-baldhead’s “feasible suggestion that the hirsutic embellishment is due to the tablets’ improving the circulation of the scalp by their vasodilating [artery-widening] action.” He offered no theory of his own. Instead, he added lamely: “I confess that I have not yet personally tried the tablets to cure my own baldness.”