Doctors' Fair

For five hot days last week, crowds of middle-aged men surged through the stuffy halls of Manhattan's Grand Central Palace, chewing cigars and mopping steamy brows. The big building was cluttered with hundreds of little booths--papered with scientific charts, decorated with hearts & flowers, pickled fetuses, stuffed dogs, old bones, trays of purpled lungs and livers, plaster glands, transparent torsos, illuminated pictures of bathing beauties, bearded women, sissified men, monstrosities of all kinds. Shirt-sleeved barkers, with pointers in their hands and cigarets drooping from their lips, tried to entice passers-by to stop and view their wares.

No annex to the World's Fair, this was the 41st annual Scientific Exhibit of the American Medical Association. The biggest and best medical show of all times, it was attended by a record crowd of 12,763 doctors from all over the U. S. The sampling doctors took home many a practical bit of new medical technique.

Urine for Ulcers. Women rarely have peptic ulcers. On a hunch that female hormones confer natural immunity, Dr. David Jacob Sandweiss, Physiologist M. H. F. Friedman and colleagues of Detroit's Wayne University made a purified extract of the urine of normal, healthy women, injected it under the skin of dogs in whom they had produced peptic ulcers. In several weeks the dogs recovered. Within the last two years the scientists have tried experimental urine injections on 60 patients, with "highly encouraging results." What the healing substance is, and where it is produced, the doctors haven't the faintest idea. But they do know that in small amounts it prevents ulcer growth without inhibiting gastric secretion. Prize patient is the experimenters' laboratory janitor, who was an ulcer man for almost a decade. Now, after a year of fortnightly injections, he has no pain, smokes cigars, eats red meat, drinks beer.

Rubber Noses. People whose ears are slashed off in auto accidents, or whose noses are eaten away by cancer, cannot always have new ones made of flesh-&-blood grafts. At the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Arthur H. Bulbulian, a trained sculptor, molds artificial noses and ears so rosy and translucent that only an eagle eye can spot them as fakes. Dr. Bulbulian uses "prevulcanized liquid latex," a creamy rubber compound, which can be tinted delicately before it hardens.

Dr. Bulbulian takes pride in matching flesh tints, in decorating his noses with tiny pores and wrinkles. Both noses and ears are glued on with a liquid adhesive made of mastic gum dissolved in chloroform or benzene. Like false teeth, false noses and ears must be doffed at night.

Whiskey for Arteries. In artery ailments, such as arteriosclerosis or Buerger's disease, patients are often attacked by muscular weakness so severe that their legs buckle under them. To tone up the muscles, doctors try to send a large supply of blood to the legs. For this they give drugs to expand the blood vessels, injections of salt solution, or even cut certain tracts in the sympathetic nervous system. As a check on the blood supply they take the temperature of the skin: if the temperature rises, they assume that the leg is getting a large supply of blood.

But Dr. Samuel Silbert of Manhattan's Mt. Sinai Hospital has long been dissatisfied with this method of checking blood supply. He had a theory that there must be a difference between the temperature of the skin and that of the underlying muscles. With Physiologist Mae Friedlander and Physical Therapist William Bierman, he tested the effects of various common drugs on both skin and muscle temperature.

Aspirin, the experimenters found, merely raises the temperature of the skin. Tobacco is harmful: it lowers both skin and muscle temperature. In their tests they decided that the most valuable drug for arteriosclerosis is alcohol, for it sends muscle temperature way up. "I make my patients drink plenty of whiskey," said gentle Dr. Silbert last week.

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