Medicine: Livers into Blood

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After pouring some cow's liver into a patient's veins last week, Professors Cyrus Cressy Sturgis and Raphael Isaacs of the University of Michigan told the fellow to get along and return five or six weeks hence. Theirs is the newest method of alleviating pernicious anemia.

Since Professors George Richards Minot & William Parry Murphy (Harvard) and Dean George Hoyt Whipple (University of Rochester) showed that something in liver causes red blood corpuscles to grow, they and others have sought some simple way of getting the liver into an anemic's system. Eating half a pound of liver a day will do the trick. But most patients balk at eating liver so often. Liver juices taken by mouth are not much more palatable.

Last year Professors Sturgis & Isaacs — the first trained at Johns Hopkins the other at the University of Cincinnati; both are 40 — dried some hog stomachs, removed the fats, fed the residue to anemics. Hog stomachs also created new blood cells. They were easier to swallow because they lacked liver's surfeiting taste, and a dessertspoonful in water or tomato juice once a day was sufficient for health.

Last week's product is even more convenient. Heretofore it has been dangerous to inject liver extracts directly into the blood stream. The extracts behaved like protein poisons. By fiddling with the liver juices after a method which has been patented, Professors Sturgis & Isaacs developed an innocuous fluid. Once introduced into a vein it whips the blood into a fury of red cell reproduction. The fury lasts for four to six weeks, when another intravenous injection becomes necessary. That is more pleasant, anemics find, than swallowing hog stomachs once a day or eating beef liver at every meal.