1912 | Medicine
Medicine
The Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen withdraws its support from medical missionary Wilfred Grenfell, now 47, who founds the International Grenfell Association, which will soon have branches in Britain, the United States, Newfoundland, and other parts of Canada (see 1892). Grenfell will be knighted in 1927 and by the time he retires in 1932 Labrador will have six Grenfell Association hospitals, four hospital ships, seven nursing stations, two orphanages, two large schools, 14 industrial centers, and a cooperative lumber mill.
Antiseptic surgery pioneer Joseph Lister, Baron Lister of Lyme Regis, dies at Walmer, Kent February 10 at age 84.
Congress enacts legislation August 14 changing the name of the Public Health and Marine Hospital Services to the Public Health Service and authorizing it to pursue investigations into sanitation, sewage disposal, and water supplies as well as hookworm, leprosy, malaria, tuberculosis, and other human diseases (see 1902; 1939).
The Sherley Amendment to the U.S. Pure Food and Drug Law of 1906 prohibits farfetched declarations of therapeutic or curative effects (see 1911). Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations Swager Sherley (D. Ky.) has sponsored the amendment, enacted August 23; it requires that the patent medicine Cuforhedake Brane-Fude be labeled 30 percent alcohol, brings therapeutic claims within the jurisdiction of the 1906 law, but requires that the Bureau of Food and Drugs prove claims to be false and fraudulent before they can be judged illegal. Promoters push cocaine as a cure for hay fever, sinusitis, and alcohol and opium abuse; patent medicines containing opium and its derivatives remain freely available, as do hypodermic needles, and many physicians continue to prescribe heroin as a treatment for morphine addiction even though heroin addiction is more deadly (see Harrison Act, 1914).
The Pituitary Body and Its Disorders by Boston surgeon Harvey Cushing, 43, advances knowledge of the pituitary gland and its relation to diabetes.
The drug MDMA introduced in Europe as a potential appetite suppressant has euphoria-producing psychedelic effects and toward the end of the century will come into widespread (if illegal) use under the name Ecstasy.
The first diagnosis of a heart attack in a living patient appears in the December 7 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Chicago physician James B. Herrick points out that what may seem to be acute indigestion, food poisoning, angina pectoris, or something else may in fact be due to a blood clot (thrombosis) in the coronary artery, which is what generally destroys a segment of the heart muscle to produce a myocardial infarction, considered until now merely a curiosity seen on autopsy as an inevitable consequence of aging. Herrick's patient (a 55-year-old banker) has survived only 52 hours, but Herrick shows that heart attacks need not be fatal. Further work will show that clots generally occur in coronary arteries damaged by arteriosclerosis (or atherosclerosis), but heart disease remains a relatively minor cause of death among Americans as compared with tuberculosis and pneumonia (see Anichkov, 1913; Herrick, 1910; 1921).