Medicine: Haematometharmozograph

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Last week young Physiologist John West Thompson left his bustling Fatigue Laboratory at Harvard, bundled up his new haematometharmozograph, and went to Kansas City. Reason: he wanted to convince the Association of Military and Civilian Flight Surgeons that his ingenious device could efficiently measure fear reactions of pilots.

Haematometharmozograph is a ten-dollar name for a simple two-hundred dollar contrivance made from an electric light bulb, a photoelectric cell and an oscillograph. On the principle that fear constricts small blood vessels in the fingers, prevents blood from freely circulating through the hands, Dr. Thompson rigged up an apparatus which would indirectly show whether blood vessels were constricted by measuring the amount of light which passes through a person's hand.

To be tested a subject merely sits in a large chair, dangles his left hand between an electric bulb and a photoelectric cell and broods on, Dr. Thompson's descriptions of fearful accidents. The more frightened the patient, the more translucent his hand. Light passing through the patient's fingers controls the amount of current generated by the cell. The current is transmitted to an amplifier, and the amplified current activates an oscillograph (an instrument which records sound or light waves on a sensitized film) or a pen recorder.

Dr. Thompson suggested that flight surgeons describe plane crashes to prospective pilots taking the test. A candidate who gets a glowing report from the haematometharmozograph would be a poor risk, for he is likely "to become unnerved when under stress."