MODERN MEDICINE — DO AN 515 



apparatus for experimentation and therapy. Last week a headline in 

 the New York Times, reporting the meetings of the American Physical 

 Society, read: "Progress is made in 'taming' neutron." The next sub- 

 heading in capital letters only a little less prominent, read: "Physicists 

 are told of Columbia work bringing nearer a powerful aid for Medicine." 

 The X-ray, the gamma rays of radium, the high-frequency current and 

 now the cyclotron. The physicist, the electrical engineer, and the 

 physician have formed a liaison in which each is mutually dependent 

 upon the other. Just as the biologist has been directing the chemist 

 as to which fractions were biologically "active" or physiologically 

 significant — and therefore most important to analyze and synthesize 

 in terms of human health — so the comparative value of the different 

 physical agents developed in the physical laboratories is being ap- 

 praised and evaluated by the medical investigator as rapidly as 

 evolved. The artificial induction of therapeutic fever by various phys- 

 ical means was inevitable after von Jauregg observed in his Vienna 

 Sanatarium that general paralysis of the insane frequently improved 

 following an intercurrent febrile infection; and, then, had the courage 

 of his convictions, sufficiently, to induce fever reactions by inoculating 

 selected patients under his care with the malaria plasmodium. Keen- 

 ness of observation was thus followed by inductive reasoning, the test 

 of therapy was successfully applied, and, finally, the bateriological, 

 cellular, and humoral mechanisms by which improvement is accom- 

 plished are just now becoming clear. It is of peculiar interest and sig- 

 nificance that the first effective treatment for syphilis of the central 

 nervous system was dependent upon the introduction of another dis- 

 ease, malaria, which through the years, until Ross, McCallum, et al., 

 discovered its cause and control, had been one of man's worst enemies, 

 and still is in some parts of the world. The ingenuity of the physician 

 is exemplified at its best in such an instance, where in discovering how 

 to conquer one disease, he learned enough to make it his servant in 

 conquering still another scourge of mankind. With the demonstration 

 of the thermolability of the Treponema pallidum and of the gonococcus 

 at human fever temperatures the importance of fever per se in these 

 diseases has been emphasized and the development of physical means 

 for the induction of fever followed naturally and inevitably. 



Another example of shrewd inductive reasoning based upon keen 

 observation by a prepared medical mind occurred during the World 

 War. Baer, an orthopedic surgeon with the American Expeditionary 

 Forces, noted that injured soldiers evacuated some hours after severe 

 injury and with wounds teeming with fly larvae, were less frequently 

 found in profound shock and seemed to have a less stormy convales- 

 cence, than men with similar but uninfested wounds. After a decade of 

 pondering this observed fact, during which time children with infected 



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