1929 - Medicine

Medicine

Crude penicillin gets its first clinical application January 9 at St. Mary's Hospital, London (see 1928). Alexander Fleming treats an assistant suffering from an infected antrum by washing out the man's sinus with diluted penicillin broth, successfully destroying most of the staphylococci (see 1928; 1931).

Physician-bacteriologist Fernand-Isidore Widal dies at Paris January 14 at age 66.

Harvard physician Samuel A. (Albert) Levine, 38, notes that 60 out of 145 heart attack patients have been hypertensive—the first link between hypertension (high blood pressure) and fatal heart disease.

Angioplasty for coronary heart disease is pioneered by German medical researcher Werner Forssmann, 23, who shows that a flexible catheter inserted into a vein in the elbow can be safely extended into the heart. Experimenting on himself, he watches the progress of the catheter in a mirror held in front of a fluoroscope screen. Condemned for being so foolhardy, Forssmann gives up cardiology in favor of urology (but see 1941).

Austrian-born U.S. psychiatrist Manfred J. Sakel, 29, uses overdoses of insulin to produce shock and finds it effective in many cases of schizophrenia (see Banting, Best, 1922; Thorazine, 1954).

The first Blue Cross nonprofit tax-exempt health insurance association is organized at Dallas, Texas, where local schoolteachers, whose unpaid bills have been a burden to Baylor University Hospital, make an arrangement with the hospital. Each teacher is guaranteed up to 21 days' free use of a semiprivate room and other hospital services on condition that small monthly fees be paid in advance on a regular basis. The program will quickly spread to all hospitals in the area with a central agency to collect the fees and the Blue Cross trademark of the American Hospital Association (the national association of voluntary hospitals, AHA) will be used by agencies throughout the country that meet AHA standards. By 1935 Blue Cross will have half a million subscribers and a Blue Shield program set up by medical societies and local doctors' guilds will provide surgical insurance (see 1940).

The Seeing Eye is founded at Nashville, Tenn., by local philanthropist and dog fancier Dorothy Wood Eustis (née Harrison), 43, who breeds German shepherds. She saw a 1927 magazine article about a Swiss school that trained dogs for blinded war veterans, was asked by a blind Tennessee man to train a dog for him, and has opened the first Seeing Eye class. Her operation will move to Whippany, N.J., in 1932 and to Morristown, N.J., in 1965, training more than 4,500 Seeing Eye dogs (shepherds, labradors, and golden retrievers) for the sightless.