Diagnosis: "Avarice"

The surgeon general of the U.S. Navy combines two professions: he is both an officer and a doctor. Last week Rear Admiral Lamont Pugh laid aside his delicate medical instruments, loaded his heaviest rifles with armor-piercing shells and fired a broadside at doctors & dentists who try to duck service in the armed forces.

"Since when," Pugh asked the Association of Military Surgeons, "has the doctor of medicine and dentistry become such a pantywaist as to require that a bald responsibility, which others accept with good grace, must be decked out with certain frills before he will buy it?" Pugh brushed aside objections that military service for doctors involves too much moving around or too little chance for advanced training. The main objection remaining, he said, "is simply a matter of easier, quicker and bigger money--avarice; a better, if . . . possibly an ephemeral, opportunity to get rich quick."

From the same platform, A.M.A. President Louis Bauer soon fired back: "[Admiral Pugh's] statements were an unjustifiable slur on the vast majority of the medical profession, and were calculated . . . to hurt the very cause in which he and all the rest of us are interested." Navyman Pugh backed water, but not much. "If I have offended any one for whom no offense was intended," he said, "then it is to that group [that] . . . I owe an apology . . . My critical remarks . . . were leveled at an element or group in the medical profession who have not served in the armed forces and who persist in contending that their unwillingness to serve is [because] the service is not attractive enough for them."

Slur or not, Admiral Pugh's attack emphasized the bald fact that the armed forces are still having trouble getting enough doctors. Soon they may have to start drafting physicians and dentists up to 51 years old.

On the technical side, the military surgeons learned that:

P: A quick-setting liquid plastic (aero-plast), sprayed from an aerosol bomb, makes a better dressing for wounds, and especially burns, than Vaseline gauze. It keeps body fluids in and keeps dirt and germs out; it seldom needs changing, and its transparency lets the surgeon look at the wound as often as he wants. Best of all, it can be applied by unskilled hands, so it can be kept handy in front-line aid stations, civil-defense posts, airplanes and crash ambulances.

P: Injury to an artery brings a change in electric potential which in turn seems to cause blood clotting. Arterial grafts should be insulated so that they cannot set up dangerous charges. Frozen grafts are fine too.

P: Of 1,056 naval aviators examined in 1940, a follow-up twelve years later showed that 192 died in combat or air accidents; only seven died of disease (far less than the normal rate). But out of 680 recently examined, 157 were dangerously overweight and 87 had diseases of the heart or arteries.

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