1961 - Medicine

Medicine

Britain's minister of health Enoch Powell, 48, increases British Health Service charges February 1.

The American Medical Association endorses the Sabin live-virus oral vaccine for poliomyelitis (see 1960). Within 5 years the Sabin vaccine will have supplanted the Salk vaccine and polio epidemics will cease to plague much of the world.

Phocomelia (literally, seal-flipper limbs) deforms 302 newborn infants in West Germany (see 1960). A Hamburg physician notes that mothers of several of the infants have taken the tranquilizer drug thalidomide in the early stages of their pregnancy, and the German Ministry of Health issues a warning to physicians (see 1962).

Acetaminophen tablets gain FDA approval in July as an over-the-counter alternative to aspirin. Research by New York-born biochemist and pharmacologist Julius Axelrod, 49, Swedish physiologist Ulf (Svante) von Euler-(Chelpin), 57, and German-born British biophysicist Bernard Katz, 50, has shown that a mixture of aspirin, phenacetin, and caffeine can work as well as aspirin with virtually no side effects. Introduced under the brand name Tylenol by McNeill Laboratories division of Johnson & Johnson, the analgesic has heretofore been available only by prescription but is far less likely to cause gastric irritation than aspirin, reduces fever, is effective against headaches and toothaches, but does not have some of acetylsalicylic acid's other properties (see 1982).

Ceylon gives up spraying houses with DDT and will soon have a major malaria epidemic (see environment [Rachel Carson book], 1962).

"Jungle doctor" Thomas A. Dooley dies of cancer at New York January 18 at age 34; bacteriologist Jules Bordet at Brussels April 6 at age 90; psychologist Arnold N. Gesell at New Haven, Conn., May 29 at age 80; psychologist-psychiatrist Carl Jung of heart and circulatory ailments at Zürich June 6 at age 85; tuberculosis vaccine co-developer Camille Guérin at Paris June 9 at age 88; Band-Aid inventor Earl Dickson at New Brunswick, N.J., September 21 at age 68.