440 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1954 



a hundredth of a second or less, depending on whether the falling 

 person has on his head a soft felt hat or a football helmet. Crash hel- 

 mets to minimize sudden deceleration of the head are now in use in 

 almost every military aircraft, since pilots, unfortunately, are unable 

 to occupy rear-facing seats with present flight equipment. 



Hugh De Haven, director of crash injury research at Cornell Uni- 

 versity Medical College in New York, is, among others, responsible 

 for stressing these considerations. In this comiection, one of his most 

 impressive studies has been the analysis of nonfatal suicide leaps in 

 the city of New York. Persons have survived virtually uninjured 

 after leaps from the tenth and even the seventeenth floor of New York 

 buildings, and, when the circumstances are analyzed in any given 

 case, it turns out that the intended suicide victim has usually landed 

 flat on his back in a soft garden plot or on a ventilating screen, or his 

 fall may have been broken by awnings or an automobile top. This 

 again indicates the importance of gradual rather than abrupt decelera- 

 tion. These principles have proved to be immediately applicable not 

 only in aircraft design but also in the automotive industry. A sum- 

 mary of these considerations has been given in Hugh De Haven's "De- 

 velopment of Crash-survival Design in Personal, Executive and Agri- 

 cultural Aircraft." " 



The literature of aviation medicine, the great part of which has 

 come from military installations, affords many other examples of 

 material that is immediately applicable to commercial aircraft and 

 to the automotive industry. It stresses the importance of having men 

 of vision, imagination, determination, and sound training in the medi- 

 cal departments of all our military services, for the contributions they 

 make are likely to be of importance not only to military operations 

 but to society in the broadest sense. 



SUBMARINE MEDICINE 



Submarine medicine offers many examples of scientific disclosures 

 with general application, but they are of less immediate significance 

 to the civilian public at the present time, since it is not much given 

 to traveling in submersibles, except for a few hardy souls such as 

 William Beebe, who study marine life at great depths in the sea, and 

 the "frogmen," who do mysterious things at depths of 100 or more 

 feet in the interests of national defense. Of course, the diver and the 

 caisson worker can always learn much from submarine experience, 

 especially about protection from caisson disease and diver's "bends." 

 There is no journal of submarine medicine, but the physiological prob- 



" Crash Injury Research, Cornell University Medical College, New York, 



(May) 1953. - i":a.;V;„.; ;. L:.l„ ::„.:-. 



