Medicine: Medicine Notes, May 3, 1926

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Clay-Eating. Mistresses who, with mystification, have watched their colored maids, newly migrated from the South, gather clay from the back yard and then chew it, learned last week from inveterate conners of the Journal of the American Medical Association that pure clay, kaolin, kept in motion with fluids, is beneficial in Asiatic cholera, bacillary dysentery, chronic ulcerative colitis and acute enteritis. In some cases the clay carries away intestinal bacteria, in others mixes with their toxic products. The Journal warns inexact thinkers that many other supposedly beneficial effects of clay-eating are spurious.

Goiter Germ? Last week a modest man spoke diffidently before the Toledo, Ohio, Academy of Medicine. He was Dr. Andre Crotti of Columbus, Ohio, who cautiously explained that after twelve years' research, he had isolated a minute organism constantly found in non-toxic goiter. He had never seen anything like it before; no one had ever described it; injected into a dog it had caused goiter. Lacking experimental facilities, he suggested that others carry on his research; perhaps he had found a cause of goiter other than the well-known lack of iodine.