Medicine: California v. New York

(See front cover) Lucifer, who was thrown out of Heaven for wanting to carry his particular Light to mankind, would have grinned sardonically had he looked up through the floor of an official chamber in Manhattan last week. Dr. Walter Bernard Coffey of San Francisco was again asking the State of New York's Department of Social Welfare permission to open a cancer research laboratory and clinic at Huntington, L. I. (TIME, March 23). His cohorts surrounded him. Opposed were Dr. John Augustus Hartwell, president of the New York Academy of Medicine, spokesman for organized Medicine, and his cohorts.

The simple question was: Should the State authorize the cancer clinic? But in the train of that simple question came a most extraordinary range of considerations—the nature and cause of cancer; the nature and authenticity of the Coffey-Humber cancer treatment; medical ethics, human nature, public policy, money, fame, and even national politics. Representing great wealth, prestige, knowledge and political power, the contestants in this greatest medical fight of many a year in some degree represented buoyant, bouncing, sometimes crass California against balanced, urbane, sometimes effete New York.

The Protagonists— In the room were: Dr. Coffey, 63, square-faced, burly, choleric.* He is chief surgeon of Southern Pacific Co. and Dollar Steamship Lines. For the railroad he has 600 doctors working under him. They care for 70,000 railroad men and their families. On the principle that ''the health of the community is the wealth of the railroad," Dr. Coffey's staff help public health officials throughout the railroad's territory. Dr. Coffey is an important California executive and a political power in the State. Professionally he is a surgeon. Characteristically he is an empiricist. "What works must be good.'' His first case, when he began practice in San Francisco 35 years ago, was a Negro who needed a minor operation. When the Negro saw the operating scissors he hauled on his clothes and ran. Dr. Coffey ran after. He, very poor, needed that first fee. A patrolman halted the patient and made him return to Dr. Coffey's office. Under threat of the patrolman's club the Negro, howling, submitted to cutting, paid his small fee, left. Dr. Coffey was obliged to give part of his small fee to the patrolman, who argued that he was the anesthetist.

Dr. John Davis Humber, 36, short & stocky, pallid from years of laboratory work. He worked out, under Dr. Coffey's direction, the anatomy of the sympathetic nervous system. Together they have proved that the sympathetic system carries sensations of pain, that the terrific pain of angina pectoris is sympathetic. Dr. Coffey stops the pain by cutting sympathetic nerves in the neck. The Coffey-Humber sympathetic studies led them to their cancer work.