Medicine: Surgeons' College

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Publicity. Dr. Miller's animadversions upon lay critics had nothing to do with his desire for laymen's help in educating the public to its medical needs. The American College of Surgeons was a pioneer in opening its meetings to everybody, in translating medical effort into commonplace terms. During last week's sessions a dozen important fellows of the College— Francis Carter Wood, Joseph Colt Bloodgood, John Carl Arpad Gerster, et al.— dined with journalists as guests of the American Society for the Control of Cancer. Doctors distrust reporters, fearing inaccuracy and exploitation. Reporters are impatient of doctors, knowing they rarely can get a frank disclosure of news. This is an old impasse which the cancer men are again trying to hurdle. The public, after a few years of cancer consciousness, has again become apathetic. Surgeons are seeing more cases in late stages, fewer in early stages. The sooner a cancer is attacked, the better the prospects of cure. Unusual bleeding, strange lumps, unhealing sores are all danger signals. Chief cause of this recurrent negligence of early cancer was laid to Depression. Cancer causes little pain or inconvenience until it becomes mortal. Impoverished victims let their ailments wait.

Upshot of the surgeon-journalist conference on cancer was that the surgeons would find a writer who knows medicine or (more difficult) a doctor who knows journalism to bombard the public with cancer warnings.

Cancer. In treatment of cancer the new contributions offered were refinements in diagnosis and treatment. Dr. George Washington Crile, for instance, reported that cancer tissue conducts electricity more easily than normal tissue, that here was a method of differential diagnosis. Dr. Donald Church Balfour urged more operations for cancer of the stomach and of the intestines. These cases are among the hardest to save. But Dr. Balfour finds that nine out of ten patients can sur- vive the operation. If lymph nodes are not involved, five out of ten live for five years or more.

The electrical knife perfected by Dr. George Austin Wyeth of Manhattan received great tribute as a cancer tool. It reams out tiny holes wherein the cut of a scalpel would be brutal.

Again the surgeons insisted that there is no evidence that cancer is caused by a germ. They reapproved Dr. James Swing's suggestion of several great cancer research institutions spotted over the U. S. (TIME, Jan. 12).

More Years. Dr. Charles Horace Mayo, his eyebrows bristling, flayed frantic oldsters: "The radios of young people are tuned to rhythmic motion. Those of old people get mainly static. There are too many 'drop-deads.' The 'drop-deads' occur in the city. They may die on the golf links, trying to show they are all right, but they really occur in the city. Farmers haven't the time to drop dead. We overdo the subject of exercise unless we have had the advantage of training early in life. Unless you have been brought up to work in early life, do not get out and try to do stunts after you are 50 or 60 years old. . . .