Physicians in Detroit

The medical names which stand biggest in the minds of the U. S. public are those of surgeons, not of physicians. A meeting of the American College of Physicians in Detroit last week did nothing to alter that fact. The men they chose to honor above all others were a young physiologist who probably will never practice medicine, an old physiologist who never did practice, and a re-articulated paralytic who has created a unique specialty of treating cripples such as he once was.

Thirty-five-year-old Eugene Markley Landis, A.B., M.S., M.D., Ph.D., of Philadelphia is the brightest young U. S. doctor who came to the attention of the College of Physicians during the past year. Dr. Landis' specialty is measuring the flow of blood through the capillaries. To do that, he uses glass tubes one five-thousandth of an inch in diameter which he inserts into the tiny bores of capillaries. The manner in which capillary blood rises in those tubes has thrown a considerable light on how heart disease causes dropsy, how kidney diseases develop, how a bruised eye turns black & blue. For this information the College of Physicians gave Dr. Landis their best prize a gold medal.

First to congratulate Prizewinner Landis was Harvard's Physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon. Dr. Cannon voluntarily gave Christian Scientists scientific grounds for their dogma by demonstrating, first, that fear and anger disturb digestion, later that an unhappy mind may cause many kinds of bodily disorders. In Detroit last week Dr. Cannon retold his researches, advised physicians "to recognize the part which [mental healers] undoubtedly play in restoring the morale of the depressed and the anxious.''

When neat Dr. Earl Reinhold Carlson of Manhattan got up to talk about palsies caused by rough handling during birth the physicians enthusiastically rose and cheered him. Injured in that way. Dr Carlson was once obliged to wear boots oversized pants and slipover sweaters be cause his unruly hands could not lace am button his clothes. People treated him a an idiotic cripple. Eventually his innate wit and grit took command of his muscles He went to Princeton, to Yale, opened clinic and two private schools for treatment of the defect (TIME, May 30, 1932) The basis of treatment, Dr. Carlson saic in Detroit last week, is the removal of fear and shame from the cripple's mind.

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