1913 - Medicine

Medicine

General Electric's W. D. Coolidge invents the modern X-ray tube (see 1916; Roentgen, 1895).

Hungarian-born physician Bela Schick, 36, at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital develops the Schick test for determining susceptibility to diphtheria.

The American Cancer Society has its beginnings in the American Society for the Control of Cancer, founded with support from philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. Nine out of 10 cancer patients die of the disease; the mortality rate will fall sharply but the incidence of cancer will increase (see 1945).

Pathologist Johannes Fibiger at the University of Copenhagen succeeds in inducing gastric tumors on a consistent basis in mice and rats by feeding them cockroaches infected with Gongylonema neoplasticum (see 1907). He shows that the tumors metastasize (proliferate) and gives support to the prevailing idea that cancer is the product of tissue irritation (see Yamagiwa, 1915).

Russian pathologist Nikolai Nikolaevich Anichkov, 29, shows that rabbits fed large amounts of cholesterol and animal fats develop hardening of the arteries (arteriosclerosis, or atherosclerosis), but rabbits are herbivorous, and they naturally die when fed animal fats. Many scientists will question the significance of Anichkov's finding (see Herrick, 1912; Bloch, 1942; Keys, 1953).

Alsatian-born Protestant missionary-physician Albert Schweitzer, 38, founds Lambaréné Hospital in French Equatorial Africa; renowned in his youth as an organist, he began preaching at Strasbourg's Church of St. Nicholas in 1899, received his MD this year after 7 years of medical studies and will be famous for his "reverence for life."

The German chemical company Merck patents the mood/mind-altering drug MDMA (3,4 Methylene-dioxy-N-methylamphetamine, or Methylenedioxymethamphetamine) that will later find use in psychotherapy but will also be abused as a street drug under names such as Ecstasy, E, Adam, X, and Empathy (see 1985).

Chiropractic founder Daniel D. Palmer leads a gala homecoming parade of students through Davenport, Iowa, in August (his son Bartlett runs the flourishing 15-year-old chiropractic school there but Palmer has not been invited), is struck by a car, and dies of his injuries at Los Angeles October 20 at age 68; appendectomy pioneer Charles McBurney dies of a coronary thrombosis on a hunting trip at Brookline, Mass., November 7 at age 68.