Doctors at Sea

Back to Manhattan last week steamed the biggest boatload of doctors ever to put to sea. There were 375 of them, mostly with wives, and they were returning from 16 days of talking shop, seeing the sights and spreading goodwill in Cuba, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Members of the Pan American Medical Association, they had chartered the Panama-Pacific liner S. S. Pennsylvania, turned their Fifth Scientific Congress into a junket.

On their tour the doctors held 64 scientific sessions, read and listened to 175 papers on a potpourri of medical & surgical subjects. They were most interested in comparing notes with their Latin-American colleagues on such tropical diseases as amebic dysentery and sprue* which have lately been increasing in the U. S.

Feted in every port, they got their biggest reception in Venezuela. There old Dictator-President Juan Vicente Gomez declared a public holiday, motored them over 300 mi. of flower-strewn highway, spent $20,000 out of his own pocket to give them a luncheon and ball, pay all their expenses.

Chosen during the cruise to serve as president of the Association through next year's congress in Rio de Janeiro was shy, modest Dr. Chevalier Jackson of Philadelphia, famed for removing growths and foreign bodies from throat, windpipe, gullet, lung. At 68 he is still active in the Chevalier Jackson Bronchoscopic Clinic with which Temple University lured him away from University of Pennsylvania in 1930.

But not even wise Dr. Jackson could resist a long toot on the horn of international brotherhood. Last week he joined Dr. Joseph Jordan Eller, able Manhattan dermatologist and Director-General of the Association, in calling the cruise "a dramatic and remarkably successful step in the establishment of permanent goodwill between the Americas."

Boy into Bone

Benjamin Hendrick is now 7. When he was two his back began to stiffen. Next year one leg got stiff, making him limp a little, and he grew awkward with his hands. Whenever he cut himself it took a long time for the wound to heal. By the time he got to school, in small Larksville, Pa., he could hardly use his arms at all and his teacher had to help him on with his coat and rubbers. For a while he was sent to a clinic for crippled children, until doctors discovered what was wrong with him. Then they took him to a hospital in Wilkes-Barre. Here he lay last week, thin, white, sandy-haired, his body slowly turning to bone.

His disease is called myositis ossificans progressiva. Extremely rare in adults, it is almost unheard of in children. All physicians know is that some disturbance of Benjamin Hcndrick's metabolism has let increased amounts of calcium seep into his muscles and bones. Some think the disturbance may be in the parathyroid glands, which regulate the body's use of calcium and phosphorous. The disease, which produces circus sideshows' "stone men," is usually not fatal to adults, sometimes causing only a local ossification. Some physicians think there is a long chance of saving Benjamin Hendrick, whose back, thighs and upper arms are already hard as rock, if his parathyroids can be stimulated to check the flow of calcium. But most of the doctors at his bedside believe the hardening will go on & on until it reaches some vital organ and stops it for good.

Last week small Benjamin Hendrick, eating well and feeling no pain, was puzzled by the number of strangers who came to his ward. "Why are all those people looking at me?" he asked his nurse. "Is it because some day I'm going to be an aviator?''

*An often fatal intestinal ailment which produces diarrhea, mouth ulcers, anemia, great loss of weight.

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