Bloodgood v. Fear

Johns Hopkins' Dr. Joseph Colt Bloodgood is a cancer expert who always "goes the whole hog" on what excites him. Last week he arranged to blarney & bully the fear out of his patients. This is a recent reversal of Dr. Bloodgood's clinical attitude. Heretofore he has preached: get an early diagnosis, no matter if you must scare the wits out of the people. Anti-cancer propaganda has had a fear motif, condoned only for its salutary effect on a supposedly ignorant, obtuse public.

Mental disease is a vast public problem. It has become a question of whether to> let people die cancerous and sane, or witless from suspicion of cancer. Cancero-phobia is a serious psychosis.

Dr. Bloodgood has arranged for Manhattan's Dr. Edward Spencer Cowles io organize a psychiatric clinic in association with the Bloodgood cancer clinic in Baltimore. Dr. Cowles, whose methods mystify and estrange many of his col leagues, has a rich private practice, a large charity clientele in Manhattan.

For ten years Dr. Cowles directed the "Body & Soul" medical clinic of Manhattan's St. Marks-in-the-Bouwerie, where with noteworthy success he reorganized bewildered minds of that Episcopalian congregation and their heterogeneous East Side-West Side guests. Bishop William Thomas Manning objected, forced the "Body & Soul" clinic out of St. Mark's (TIME, July 25). Dr. Cowles organized the Cowles Psychiatric Foundation which conducts a free clinic in a public hall which he & rich friends have hired for philanthropy.

The Cowles treatment for sick minds--after any body, nerve, or brain diseases have been treated--is to give the patients mild medication and then to force them to do the very things which they fear to do. Hard reason and scant sympathy accomplish much in the large, book-&-furniture crowded consulting room of his private Park Avenue Hospital.

Dr. Bloodgood's maddened cancer patients Dr. Cowles expects to calm with reason, compel with sense. Dr. Cowles will divide his time between Baltimore and Manhattan (traveling by plane), beginning soon after New Year's. How he deals with neurotic patients Dr. Bloodgood does not much care. Dr. Bloodgood's prime interest is to see many cancer cases, and to see them early in their disease.

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