1940 - Medicine

Medicine

"Penicillin as a Chemotherapeutic Agent" in the August 24 issue of The Lancet reports studies by Howard W. Florey, now at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology (see 1939; 1941).

Rochester, N.Y.-born Lederle Laboratories chemist Richard Owen Roblin, 33, develops the sulfa drug sulfadiazine (see sulfanilamide, 1935).

U.S. Blue Cross health insurance programs have 6 million subscribers, up from 500,000 in 1935, but Blue Shield surgical insurance covers only 260,000 (see 1950).

The Rh factor in blood (named for the rhesus monkeys used in research) is discovered by blood type pioneer Karl Landsteiner, now 72, who joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research at New York in 1922 (see 1909). Landsteiner's colleague Alexander S. Wiener has participated in the discovery (see Dausset, 1951).

Edwin J. Cohn at Harvard separates the albumin, globulin, and fibrin fractions of blood plasma (see pernicious anemia, 1930). The American Red Cross and U.S. Navy will use albumin in the next 6 years to treat shock, globulin to treat various forms of infection, and fibrin to stop hemorrhages while serum gamma globulin will be used in years to come for mass immunization against measles, poliomyelitis, and other epidemic diseases.

Swedish biochemist Arne Tiselius at the University of Uppsala begins research into the separation of proteins and other substances by means of adsorption chromatography. Now 37, he has used electrophoretic methods to separate the chemically similar proteins of blood serum.

Blood bank pioneer Bernard M. Fantus dies at Oak Park, Ill., April 14 at age 65. New York's Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital establishes the first blood bank since the one started by Fantus 3 years ago. Washington, D.C.-born surgeon Charles R. (Richard) Drew, 36, is the first black physician with a doctorate in science from Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons. He has investigated the preservation and storage of blood (see Vaughan, 1939), found that whole blood cannot be shipped safely to Britain where it is needed for transfusions, and inaugurates the bank with Rockefeller Institute pathologist Peyton Rous, now 60, and others, who help him establish uniform procedures for procuring and processing the blood, shipping the plasma (whole blood minus its white and red cells), but racist segregation rules will prevent Drew from donating his own blood.

Celiac patients in Dutch hospitals improve after German occupation authorities requisition all wheat and rye flour. Hospital administrators discover that the disease (also called nontropical sprue) comes from an intolerance for gluten, the major protein in wheat and rye.

Only 37.6 of 10,000 U.S. women die after being delivered of live infants, down from 60.8 in 1915.

Nobel psychiatrist-neurologist Julius Wagner-Jauregg dies at Vienna September 27 at age 83, having developed fever therapy for several mental disorders; English medical missionary Sir Wilfred Grenfell dies at Charlotte, Vt., October 9 at age 75.