1941 - Medicine

Medicine

Diabetes insulin therapy pioneer Sir Frederick G. Banting dies in an air crash at Musgrave Harbour, Newfoundland, February 21 at age 49.

Penicillin pioneer Howard W. Florey flies to Lisbon by Pan Am Clipper in June and proceeds to New York, where he appeals to the Rockefeller Institute for financial help in developing the antibiotic that will soon become the world's major weapon against infections and chronic diseases (see 1940). Florey and a companion have rubbed spores of the fungus mold into their clothing so that they would have something to demonstrate should the purified penicillin that they carried be somehow taken away from them en route. Ernst B. Chain urges the British government to apply for a patent on penicillin, but no action is taken and U.S. firms will obtain the patents. Pfizer & Co. at New York begins production in December, using deep-bowl fermenters employed earlier to produce acetone and citric acid (see world supply, 1942).

Paris-born Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons physician-physiologist André F. (Frédéric) Cournand, 46, and his New Jersey-born colleague Dickinson W. (Woodruff) Richards, 45, use a slight modification of the cardiac catheterization technique pioneered by Werner Forssmann in 1929 to investigate a patient's heart by means of a catheter inserted into an elbow vein. They find that they can measure blood pressure and other conditions inside the heart (see 1977; bypass surgery, 1967).

The Saturday Evening Post runs a story in March about Alcoholics Anonymous (see 1935). A local bank foreclosed on the mortgage of the Brooklyn house of cofounder Bill W.'s in-laws 2 years ago, he and his wife have been living in borrowed rooms or in temporary quarters above A.A.'s 24th Street clubhouse in Manhattan, but John D. Rockefeller Jr. last year gave a dinner for AA and was impressed enough to establish a small trust that provides Bill W. with $30 per week at a time when many families are living on less. Rockefeller rejected initial appeals to fund AA, saying that money would spoil its spirit, and the organization has spread through church groups. The magazine article produces a flood of letters, attendance at meetings begins to soar, and English novelist Aldous Huxley will call Bill W. "the greatest social architect of our time" (see Synanon, 1958).

Boston gynecologist George (Van Siclen) Smith and his epidemiologist wife, Olive (neé Watkins), at the Free Hospital for Women note that women who have suffered spontaneous abortions have lower blood levels of estrogen than women who come uneventfully to term; believing that administering estrogen will protect developing fetuses, they will prescribe diethylstilbestrol (DES) to 515 pregnant women between 1943 and 1948 (see Dodds, 1938); cooperating gynecologists in 48 other U.S. cities will give DES to 117 pregnant women in the same period, and by 1952 there will be more than 30 different brands of estrogen products on the market, including pills, injectable solutions, ointments, nasal sprays, and suppositories. The synthetic estrogen hormone DES has been used since 1938 to promote quicker fattening of livestock and poultry and is now prescribed for the prevention of miscarriage (it is also used in doses of 25 mg. per day for 5 days after intercourse to prevent conception) (see 1971).