1906 - Medicine

Medicine

The Great American Fraud by New York journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams, 35, exposes the fraudulent claims and hazardous ingredients of U.S. patent medicines. The book has been serialized in Collier's. The Pure Food and Drug Act signed into law by President Roosevelt June 30 prohibits "the importation and use of opium for other than medicinal purposes" (see Massachusetts law, 1905). The Senate has passed the Heyburn Bill February 21 by a 63 to 4 vote following pressure by the 59-year-old American Medical Association, and the House has approved it 240 to 17 June 23, but although the new law requires patent medicines to list their ingredients many widely advertised over-the-counter drugs continue to contain opium and its derivatives (see 1908; Harrison Act, 1914).

Psychology of Dementia Praecox by Swiss psychologist Carl (Gustav) Jung, 31, breaks new ground. Jung meets Sigmund Freud for the first time and has doubts as to the sexual aspects of Freud's theory of psychoanalysis (see 1895; 1908).

The Wasserman test developed by German physician August Wasserman, 40, and (independently) by Hungarian physician Lazlo Detre is a specific blood test for syphilis based on immunology discoveries by Belgian bacteriologist Jules (Jean Baptiste Vincent) Bordet, 36. The test will be administered routinely to applicants for marriage licenses (see 1938). Its use in St. Louis and New York indicates that 10 percent of pregnant married women are actively syphilitic and 5 to 6 percent of infants born to poor families are congenitally syphilitic (see Ehrlich, 1909).

Jules Bordet develops a vaccine against the whooping cough bacillus.

The treatise "Mechanism of Gas Exchange in Lungs" by Danish physiologist August Krogh, 31, shows that the capillaries (small blood vessels) in the lungs dilate or contract in proportion to the blood requirement of the lung tissues, and active muscles have larger numbers of open capillaries than less active ones.

Austrian pediatrician Clemens (Freiherr) von Pirquet, 32, notices that patients who have received injections of horse serum or smallpox vaccine generally have quicker and more severe reactions to second injections. He coins the word allergy, and it begins to replace the word anaphylaxis introduced by physiologist Charles Richet in 1902. Pirquet works to develop a test for tuberculosis (see 1909).

Ferdinand-Isidore Widal recognizes the retention of sodium chloride in patients with cardiac edema and nephritis (kidney inflammation); now 44, he recommends low-salt or salt-free diets for both diseases.

Ohio-born pathologist Howard Taylor Ricketts, 35, demonstrates in the spring that Rocky Mountain spotted fever can be transmitted by the bite of a cattle tick; he will describe the causative organism in 1908, and the toxin spread by ticks will be called Rickettsia (see rickettsialpox, 1944).