Parsley & Ginger

Hands & feet as clumsy as a seal's flippers are the penalty which several thousand Dutch, Jugoslavian and German girls are paying for not wanting or daring to have babies. Theirs is precisely the punishment that was inflicted upon several thousand U. S. citizens who, craving drink, drank Jamaica ginger extract (TIME, March 24, 1930 et seq.). The European girls took apiol, an oily fluid obtained from parsley flowers, as an abortifacient. Both the European apiol and the U. S. ginger extract had been adulterated by viciously shrewd manufacturers with a tricresyl phosphate, newly discovered organic chemical which destroys nerves in the spinal cord (TIME, July 28. 1930). First nerves to go are usually those controlling the muscles of the feet, next those leading to the hands.

No one has been known to die from the poisoning, but no one has been known to recover from the paralysis, said Dr. Maurice Isador Smith last week. Dr. Smith, 45, is the National Institute of Health investigator who two years ago traced the widespread "ginger jake" paralysis to tri-ortho-cresyl-phosphate adulteration. (Manufacturers and vendors have been jailed.) His information about Europe's poisoned apiol was the first revelation to U. S. womanhood of danger in that direction.

Dr. Smith was one of four U. S. Public Health Service scientists whom Surgeon General Hugh Smith Gumming brought to Manhattan last week to lecture before the New York Electrical Society's science forum. The others: flea-bitten Dr. Rolla Eugene Dyer, discoverer of the cause of typhus fever in the U. S. (TIME, Nov. 7); tick-bitten Dr. Roscoe Roy ("Spenny") Spencer, who invented a new kind of vaccine (macerated insects which carry the virus of disease) and tried it out first on himself; Dr. Carl Voegtlin, pharmacologist, who has accumulated so many facts about the chemistry of cell growth that last week he dared to hint that just around the biological corner lie chemical cures for cancers.

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