Medicine: Capsules, may 6, 1957

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¶ Not content with an FM transmitter so small that it can be swallowed for broadcasting from inside the digestive tract (TIME, April 22), medical research-TS and electronics designers have produced a microphone so small that it can be put in the end of a catheter (flexible tube) and worked through a blood vessel right into the heart. Developed by New Jersey's Gulton Industries, Inc., the microphone is one-twentieth of an inch in diameter, three-quarters of an inch long. Dr. Howard L. Moscovitz of Manhattan's Mt. Sinai Hospital has used it to diagnose heart defects-by placing it next to heart valves and in the great vessels, and listening to the distinctive sounds. t| To help get crippled arthritics mobile again, the Arthritis and Rheumatism Foundation started sending out mobile rehabilitation units in 16 states. Station wagons or panel trucks loaded with devices for applying dry or wet heat, pulleys, weights and other equipment for limbering up disabled joints are manned by physical therapists, who make house calls. The therapists give treatment and advise the family on how to continue it. ij Stanford University radiologists reported hopefully on one year's use of the first linear accelerator built for medical purposes: a 6,000,000-volt unit, it generates electrons in a straight line, fires them at precious-metal targets to produce X-rays that can be focused sharply on cancers deep in the body. Of 74 patients treated, with a variety of tumors in the throat, lungs, prostate, kidney, bladder and brain, two-thirds now show no sign of disease, though no cures will be claimed for five years.

¶ Infections after burns delay healing, make skin grafts slough off faster, and may turn a superficial burn into a deep one. Researchers at Glasgow's Royal Hospital for Sick Children, searching for a locally applied antiseptic that would kill germs without destroying tissue, report best results with a weak solution of chlorhexidine, now use it in preference to all other methods of treating burns and scalds.