Medicine: Capsules, Dec. 12, 1955

¶ No sooner had the Salk polio vaccine received an apparently clean bill of health (TIME, Nov. 28) than the Massachusetts State Poliomyelitis Advisory Committee dissented.* State authorities, it ruled, are still not to use the vaccine until there is more convincing safety evidence. Last summer Massachusetts was stricken with the worst polio epidemic in its history (3,844 cases reported so far this year), and all-out advocates of the Salk vaccine have argued that many cases might have been prevented if the advisory committee had not blocked the injection program. But the committee is worried about the opposite possibility: that the vaccine may have contributed to the epidemic. Live virus might slip through undetected, cause no infection in the person injected, yet it could multiply in his body and infect other members of the family or playmates. However, the committee expressed hope that by mid-January improved methods will have made the vaccine really safe.

¶ Chosen by the American Medical Association as General Practitioner of the Year: 66-year-old Dr. E. Roger Samuel of Mount Carmel, Pa. (pop. 15.000). A pipe smoker, Dr. Samuel thinks that wonder drugs are more dangerous than tobacco, said he had "too many bad results" in using antibiotics. His advice to young practitioners: collect your bills promptly, because "a person who owes you a bill is your worst enemy."

¶ Smoking, already tied to lung cancer, picked up another morbid relation when Drs. Francis C. Lowell, William Franklin, Alan L. Michelson and Irving W. Schiller, all of Massachusetts Memorial Hospital, told a Boston meeting of the American Medical Association that they have discovered an association between smoking and obstructive pulmonary emphysema. In a study of 34 victims of emphysema— a swelling and rupture of the lung's tiny air sacs that can prove disabling or even fatal—the doctors discovered that 100% of the patients smoked, and that they smoked an average of twice as many "pack years" (packs per day times years of smoking) as other patients.