Medicine: Birth Booster?

Many of the 500,000 French babies born annually during the occupation are believed to have been German-sired. Despite these contributions, the French birth rate, already low before the war, ran consistently behind the death rate. In six years (1936-42), France's population dropped 4,000,000. The return of 2,000,000 Frenchmen from German prison camps and slave labor battalions, now under way, will be a step in the right direction, but probably not enough of one. For many of these men have been so weakened by undernourishment and ill treatment that they have temporarily lost either the desire or the capacity for fatherhood.

From London last week came news of a French attempt to solve this sere national problem. The report (which the French Ministry of Health understandably denied) : the French Government is buying £25,000,000 worth of that restorer of physical and sexual vigor, testosterone, the male hormone (TIME, May 28). Treatment, by injection, will be voluntary, secret and free to any man under Government medical care or returning from captivity.