1925 | Medicine
Medicine
Malignant diphtheria strikes icebound Nome, Alaska, in January. Two people die, local physician Curtis Welch of the U.S. Public Health Service depletes his 7,500-unit supply of 6-year-old antitoxin and uses the radiotelegraph January 21 to send for more, fearing an epidemic that would kill more of the town's 1,429 residents and jeopardize 11,000 lives in the area. The Anchorage Railroad Hospital reports that it has 300,000 units, enough to cure about 100 patients and treat perhaps 300 who have been exposed to the disease, but Alaska's only two planes—open-cockpit models—have been crated for the winter. Territorial governor Scott C. Bone orders the serum sent by rail 298 miles north to Nena. Norwegian-born "musher" Leonhard Seppala sets out from Shaktolik January 27 with a dog team led by his 48-pound Siberian husky Togo, crosses Norton Sound on pack ice heaving in the ground swell of the Bering Sea as a blizzard sweeps in with winds of 80 miles per hour, and covers the first 240 miles before handing the serum off to the next musher; 19 other mushers with fresh teams relay the antitoxin as temperatures drop below -50° F, and veteran musher Gunnar Kasson covers the final 55-mile leg, arriving at Nome February 2 at 5:36 in the morning. The teams have covered 655 miles in 5 days and 7 hours (the previous record was 9 days), and the antitoxin is quickly thawed in time to prevent an epidemic. Kasson's lead dog Balto is honored with a bronze statue installed in New York's Central Park.
Soviet Russia has her last major outbreak of cholera (see 1855).
Clinical thermometer inventor Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt dies at Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, February 22 at age 88, having made useful studies of arterial and nervous disorders.
The Menninger Clinic opens in a farmhouse at Topeka, Kan., and begins a revolution in the treatment of mental illness. Country doctor Charles F. Menninger, 63, starts a group practice for the mentally ill with his sons Karl (Augustus), 32, and William, 26; operating on C. F.'s premise that no patient is untreatable, they combine a family atmosphere with physical exercise and a team of multidiscipline doctors for each patient—a "total-environment" approach inspired by a visit C. F. made in 1908 to the Mayo Clinic at Rochester, Minn.
The incurable, hereditary blood disorder Cooley's anemia described by Detroit physician Thomas Benton Cooley, 54, impairs the synthesis of hemoglobin, kills its victims at an average age of 20, and has been common for thousands of years in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, the Philippines, and parts of India and China.