Medicine: Surgeons in San Francisco

The drama of an aging surgeon’s pugnacious ambition overrode the scores of operations and scientific lectures of the American College of Surgeons meeting in San Francisco last week. Before he dies, Dr. Walter Bernard Coffey, 67, insists on nailing his name to the wall of medical fame as a conqueror of cancer.

Nine years ago Dr. Coffey became chief surgeon of Southern Pacific R. R. That job made him the boss doctor of all the railroad’s employes. It also made him the public health supervisor of all the communities which Southern Pacific created and fostered along its right-of-way. And the loyalties of all those people made Dr. Coffey a most important doctor in the State of California.

About 15 years ago Dr. Coffey noticed the research which young Dr. John Davis Humber performed on the sympathetic nervous system and the adrenal glands. With Dr. Humber, Dr. Coffey developed a hunch that the cortex of the adrenals governed the natural growth of all the cells of the body, that for lack of an adequate amount of the cortical hormone cancers developed.

Drs. Coffey & Humber gave crude extracts of adrenal cortex to victims of cancer. Many of them at once declared that they felt better. A very few recovered from what may or may not have been cancer ulcers.

That was enough for Dr. Coffey. Being impatient with the slowness of orthodox doctors in double-checking new remedies, he let newspapers know that he felt pretty certain that he had a remedy for cancer. California’s Senator Hiram Johnson helped matters by letting Dr. Coffey expound his ideas about the cortical extract which abated cancer before a Senate Committee.

But when Chief Surgeon Coffey of Southern Pacific stormed Manhattan in his private car, the New York Academy of Medicine scorned his remedy, made him give up a $1,000,000 gift, and told him to keep quiet until he produced patients who remained cured of cancer for at least five years after taking his stuff (TIME, Feb. 24, 1930 et seq.). Black with fury, Dr. Coffey returned to his native San Francisco to bide his time for five-year cures of cancer. Last week came his first opportunity to talk to a national medical body. To several hundred fellows of the American College of Surgeons assembled at St. Francis Hospital, he declared:

“We have treated 7,513 patients with supra-corcin, our extract of the adrenal cortex. Of these, 3,872 died before they could receive the minimum amount of treatment needed for more than relief from pain. We selected 1,040 of the others because there was no doubt that they had hopeless, inoperable cancer. Five years after treatment 53 or 5% of these 1,040 are entirely free from any sign of cancer. In another 55 cases the growths have become inactive.”

Dr. James Ewing of Manhattan, dean of U. S. cancer investigators, has said: “Not more than 5% of cancer cases live more than five years.” With double that percentage of survivals, Dr. Coffey saw fit to crow over the American Medical Association and the American College of Surgeons.

The American College of Surgeons continued to ignore him by failing to give him a place in their cancer symposium. Dr. Donald Church Balfour of Rochester, Minn., the ingoing president of the College, anticipating Dr. Coffey’s argument, simply said: “Cancer is curable if it is removed while it is a local disease. Cure of cancer by advertised extracts, serums, and so forth is a myth.”

The surgeons’ convention also provided plenty of good, sound, workaday surgery. For weeks California surgeons had been saving up their extraordinary cases to demonstrate their virtuosity to their visiting fellows. Sightseers repaid the local surgeons by giving them many a wise bit of counsel, among which were the following:

Rhizotomy. High blood pressure may be due to hardened or tense arteries. Both resist the pulsations of blood, cause back pressure upon the heart. Hardened arteries are irreparable. Tense arteries are that way because sympathetic nerves constrict them. If those nerves are drugged the arteries will relax, the blood pressure will fall. To make such relaxation permanent, surgeons like Dr. Alfred Washington Adson of the Mayo Clinic cut the sympathetic nerves involved. The most effective operation. said Dr. Adson, is rhizotomy, or the snipping of the nerve roots as they come out of the spinal column. To accomplish this, Dr. Adson cuts ribs on both sides of the chest and almost takes the torso apart.

“Because of the formidable nature of this operation, an effort is now being made to develop a modification of the splanchnic nerve resection,” said Dr. Adson who explained that he removes only a section of the twelfth pair of ribs, cuts a few handy sympathetic nerves, excises a chunk from each adrenal gland.

Besides lowering blood pressure rhizotomy or splanchnic resection “leads to disappearance of perspiration on the legs and lower abdomen, increases the warmth of these parts of the body, and turns them slightly more pink than usual.”

Skull Cleansing. At the University of California Dr. Howard Christian Naffziger and Dr. Ottiwell Wood Jones Jr. treat cancers and infections of the skull by taking out the bad section, scraping, boiling and thoroughly sterilizing it. In case of cancer the cleansed piece of skull may at once be clamped back in place. In case of infection, the skull surgeon must wait days and weeks until all traces of infection within the skull cavity are eliminated. Then he can clap the cleansed lid upon the opening.

Smoking Before Breakfast. During his discussion of stomach ulcers, to which he believes certain people are predisposed at birth, Dr. Edward William Alton Ochsner of Tulane University declared: “Excessive use of tobacco, especially between meals, on an empty stomach, is dangerous. Very bad is smoking in the morning before breakfast.”

Fertility Vitamin. Big, bland Dr. Herbert McLean Evans of the University of California displayed two vials, the size of a lady’s little finger, filled with glistening, white crystalline powder. Those crystals were purified Vitamin E, explained Dr. Evans. He had discovered that vitamin 13 years ago, but only last summer did he succeed in isolating the pure stuff from wheat and cotton seed. Vitamin E is important to scientists because men & women must have it in their food if they want to produce children. But ordinary men & women need not fret, because with their ordinary daily food they get all the Vitamin E they need to insure their fertility.

“2,500,000 Operations are performed in 2,500 U. S. and Canadian hospitals every year,” said Dr. George Washington Crile of Cleveland, acting director-general of the College since the death of Founder Dr. Franklin H. Martin of Chicago last spring (TIME, March 19).