1939 - Medicine

Medicine

Tabakmissbrauch und Lungencarcinom by University of Cologne physician F. H. (Franz Hermann) Muller relates smoking to lung cancer, but although the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) carries an abstract in its September 30 issue, newspapers generally do not report the finding (see 1933; Ochsner, 1945). Adolf Hitler has ordered the appropriation of 100,000 Reichmarks to fund a study of the dangers of tobacco and established an institute at Jena to work on the issue as part of a program to improve health, especially among women who may bear sons for the Fatherland. Thuringian officials ban smoking on trolleys, trains, and in many public places, but although high wartime taxes on tobacco will curb use, especially by women, the pressures of war will force the Nazis to provide tobacco to civilians and to the Wehrmacht. The man in charge of Hitler's lung cancer experiment is also responsible for the euthanasia program that will kill 70,000 physically and mentally defective Germans (he will commit suicide, and the association with totalitarianism will taint efforts to discourage smoking).

A rabies epidemic begins in Poland and spreads among foxes, bats, and other mammals, including dogs and cows. By 1950 the disease will be in Germany, it will advance at the rate of about 25 miles per year, and the first case of a rabid dog in more than 50 years in Britain will be reported in 1969 despite the quarantine that has been in place since 1901.

German scientists synthesize the psychotropic drug meperidine (Demerol); only one-tenth as potent as the narcotic analgesic morphine introduced in 1806, it is also less addictive (see codeine, 1832; heroin, 1898).

Australian-born Oxford University pathologist Howard W. (Walter) Florey, 42, and his German-refugee colleague, Ernest B. (Boris) Chain, 34, isolate the antibacterial agent observed in a fungus by Alexander Fleming in 1928 (see 1931). They use it in May and obtain amazing results in mice studies, but although a London police officer close to death from an infected rose-thorn puncture responds to treatment, they find that it takes 3,000 times as much penicillin to treat a human being as a mouse and do not have enough to save the policeman, nor can they save six dying children. Florey asks for a government grant to fund research, but is granted only £50 in September (see 1940).

Ukrainian-born Rutgers University biochemist Selman A. (Abraham) Waksman, 52, and H. Boyd Woodruff isolate actinomycin in pure form from an actinomycete and find that it is an effective bactericide (a French researcher coined the term antibiotic in 1889; Waksman will suggest its use in 1942 after being asked by the editor of Biological Abstracts to recommend a term for compounds and preparations that are produced by microbes and have antimicrobial properties). The isolation of actinomycin will lead to the discovery of many other antibiotics in soil microorganisms (see 1943).

French-born bacteriologist René (Jules) Dubos, 38, at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research isolates two agents from swamp soil that are effective against a broad spectrum of gram-positive bacteria but are too toxic for internal use by humans. In isolating tyrocidine and gramicidine, Dubos establishes procedures that his former teacher Selman A. Waksman will adopt as he focuses his attention on the medicinal uses of antibacterial soil microbes (see 1943).

English pathologist and educator Janet (Maria) Vaughan, 40, establishes an Emergency Blood Transfusion Service in June, anticipating a need for safe blood in the event of war (see Bethune, 1936; Chicago blood bank, 1937). She has worked with the Spanish Medical Aid Committee and become familiar with techniques for preserving and storing whole blood and blood plasma (see Drew, 1940). Canadian physician and humanitarian Norman Bethune operates on a wounded solder at a remote village in China's Heibei Province, nicks his finger (he has no surgical gloves), and dies of blood poisoning November 12 at age 49.

English medical researcher Leonard Colebrook goes to France at the outbreak of war to investigate the treatment of burns (see 1935). Now 56, he will establish the efficacy of sulfa drugs (and, later, of penicillin) in controlling burn-related infections and will urge wider application of skin-grafting techniques to heal burns.

President Roosevelt transfers the 141-year-old U.S. Public Health Service in June from the Treasury Department to a newly created Federal Security Agency (FSA), a noncabinet group that combines a number of New Deal agencies and services related to health, education, and welfare (see 1912; HEW, 1953).

Charles Mayo of the Mayo Clinic dies at Chicago May 26 at age 73; his brother William at Rochester, Minn., July 28 at age 78; physician-author Havelock Ellis at Washbrook, Sussex, July 8 at age 80; psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler at his native Zollikon, Switzerland, July 15 at age 82; Sigmund Freud of throat cancer at London September 23 at age 83 (he has smoked 20 cigars per day, and the last person to see him alive is novelist H. G. Wells, who has been trying to obtain a special act of Parliament to allow the psychoanalyst to become a British subject without the 5-year residence normally required). Freud's Viennese-born psychoanalyst daughter Anna Freud, 43, carries on her father's work, championing the cause of analysis; physician-educator Harvey W. Cushing dies at New Haven, Conn., October 7 at age 70; surgeon Anton Eiselsberg near St. Valentin, Austria, October 25 at age 79; pharmacist Charles R. Walgreen at Chicago December 11 at age 66.