1955 - Medicine

Medicine

Prednisone is introduced for treating arthritis and other conditions. The new steroid drug has far fewer side effects than cortisone (see 1948; 1949).

University of Michigan microbiologist Thomas Francis Jr. announces at Ann Arbor April 12 (the 10th anniversary of former president Franklin D. Roosevelt's death) that a large-scale field test of the Salk polio vaccine has proved it safe and effective in 80 to 90 percent of cases (see 1954). The federal government grants a license for mass distribution of the vaccine, and batches are rushed to market, but a manufacturing error at Cutter Laboratories in California causes nine lots of faulty vaccine to be sent out, the virus in the lots has not been completely inactivated, and more than 200 children come down with polio; 11 die, 50 are left paralyzed, and vaccination is halted for 2 weeks while the source of the problem is located. The scandal embarrasses Surgeon General Leonard Scheele, who will resign next year.

Minneapolis physician C. (Clarence) Walton Lillehei, 35, pioneers open-heart surgery with pumps to keep the blood circulating (see 1893). Absent a way to place oxygen into the bloodstream and circulate blood throughout the body, such surgery has been limited heretofore to disorders that could be remedied without entering the heart itself, but Lillehei and his colleague Richard A. Wall have devised a helix reservoir bubble oxygenator that bubbles oxygen through the blood during an operation in April on 4-year-old congenital heart disease patient Pamela Schmidt at University Hospital. Lillehei opens her chest, cuts into her heart, sews up a hole the size of a half-dollar with seven silk stitches, closes her, and waits while her heart struggles to regain its regular beat, but although she survives and will live into the next century Lillehei will lose six out of his next seven cross-circulation patients, including a 7-month-old infant.

President Eisenhower suffers a heart attack at Denver in September while on vacation at his in-laws' house. Physicians at the local veterans hospital treat him with heparin, put him on a low-fat diet, and prescribe low doses (35 mgs. per week) of Coumadin, a blood thinner used to prevent blood clots; a navy recruit tried to commit suicide in 1951 by ingesting 567 mgs. of the rat poison Warfarin used since 1947, he made a full recovery, and researchers discovered that a low dose of Warfarin with close monitoring was a better anticoagulant than dicoumarol, patented in 1941. Coumadin was introduced commercially last year, and while rats will develop resistance to Warfarin, physicians will continue to use the new anticoagulant for heart patients.

U.S. National Heart Institute researchers find that reserpine depletes the brain's supply of the chemical substance serotinin (see 1952; LSD, 1953).

Penicillin pioneer Sir Alexander Fleming dies of heart disease at London March 11 at age 73; Nobel surgeon (and former Portuguese foreign minister) Antonio Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz at his Lisbon home December 13 at age 81.