1946 - Medicine

Medicine

The journal Science reports that a Cornell University team headed by biochemist Vincent du Vigneaud has synthesized penicillin (see 1945; nutrition, 1940). Now 45, du Vigneaud has earlier synthesized the tripeptide glutathione, isolated the antidiuretic hormone vasopressin, and made other breakthroughs (see Nystatin, 1950).

The United States has more than 25,000 new cases of infantile paralysis (poliomyelitis), up from more than 10,000 in 1943 (see 1947).

Soviet surgeon Vladimir P. Demikhov, 30, pioneers heart-transplant surgery by performing the procedure on a dog that keeps its old heart as well as the new one and survives for 5 months. Demikhov next year will perform a lung transplant on a dog (see Medawar, 1953).

The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by New York pediatric psychiatrist Benjamin Spock, 43, is published in May and counters the stern dictums laid down by many previous books of its kind (see Gesell, 1943); it will be used to raise generations of children along what some will call permissive lines of behavioral standards. "Don't be afraid to trust your own common sense," Spock writes. "What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best." His book of relaxed, practical advice has sales of 750,000 copies in its first year without advertising. Spock will revise its second edition to focus more on parents' anxieties and will add a section entitled "Parents Are Human" for the 1957 revision. It will be retitled Baby and Child Care, translated into 42 languages, including Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Tamil, Thai, and Urdu, and in the next 50 years will have sales of more than 43 million copies.

The health hazards of smoking come under scrutiny in a medical symposium held October 2 at the University of Buffalo. Lung cancer is six times more prevalent among men than among women, and physician William Rienkoff says, "It will be interesting, now that women are smoking, to see if the much higher ratio of the malignancy of the lung in men is decreased by an increase in the incidence in women."