Pick-Me-Up Let Down

In Toronto the earnings of two swimming pools on his property enable Dr. William James McCormick to devote himself to hobnobbing with learned doctors, doing an occasional piece of medical research. Last year he read about the research Drs. Howard Wilcox Haggard and Leon A. Greenberg had done on tobacco smoking (TIME. July 2, 1934). Those two Yale scientists found, as have other physiologists, that nicotine makes the adrenal glands excrete adrenalin which makes the liver and muscles pour their stored-up sugar into the blood stream where it becomes available for work, pleasure or refreshment. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. focused the magnifying eye of its advertising department upon that minuscule chip in the large mosaic of scientific facts about tobacco, burst forth with this advice: "Get a Lift with a Camel!"

Drs. Haggard & Greenberg had not reasoned so far. And Dr. McCormick decided that Camel advertising, which no longer uses the "Lift" slogan, was presumptuous. A non-smoker himself, Dr. McCormick bought nine Flemish Giant hares, had two senior medical students from the University of Toronto poison them with nicotine. The nicotine dissolved out of a single cigaret soaked in water is enough to make a grown man deathly sick. The solution of three cigarets will throw an adult into such convulsions that he will probably die within 15 minutes. Eight of Dr. McCormick's hares died of nicotine poisoning in due course.

Meanwhile Dr. McCormick read medical literature on tobacco smoking and, with the evidence his dead hares supplied, eventually reached conclusions which the American Journal of Hygiene published this week.

On the whole. Dr. McCormick agrees with the facts deduced by Drs. Haggard & Greenberg. He also agrees with the inferences which Camels considered expedient to exploit. But alongside those chips of fact he placed other chips: morphine, cocaine, strychnine, chloral hydrate, carbon monoxide, bichloride of mercury, ether, chloroform, diphtheria, tuberculosis, syphilis, influenza, typhoid fever, burns, asphyxia, hemorrhage, cancer, all stimulate the adrenals, cause a similar chemical increase of sugar in the blood. In the case of the intoxicants, biochemists find a temporary "lift" similar to that of nicotine. In the case of the infections, there might also be a perceptible feeling of well being, were it not for the fact that the body was already engaged in a major battle against disease. From these facts Dr. McCormick deduces that the use of nicotine is biochemically in the same class as the use of morphine, strychnine, or chloroform or a deliberate exposure to tuberculosis, typhoid fever or influenza. To clinch his reasoning Dr. McCormick pointed out that many people cannot endure smoking during acute infections or fevers.

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