Medicine: Capsules, Aug. 3, 1953

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¶Armed with radioactive phosphorus supplied by the AEC, two top U.S. specialists flew to Yugoslavia to treat Cardinal Stepinac for polycythemia (an excess of red blood cells, sometimes called "reverse leukemia"): the University of California's Radiation Expert John H. Lawrence (TIME, April 7, 1952) and Chicago Surgeon John F. Ruzic.

¶With 5,373 cases reported, the 1953 polio season was running neck & neck with 1952 (5,415 to the same date). One-third of the gamma globulin set aside for mass inoculations had already been parceled out among eleven communities in eight states.

¶Stanford University decided to move its medical school from San Francisco, where real estate and operating costs come high, to the Palo Alto campus down the peninsula. Population has grown fast around Palo Alto, insuring plenty of patients for students to observe in the university hospital.

¶Officials of New Orleans' giant Charity Hospital were embarrassed when an intern recognized "Dr. Jack Lang," who had been on the staff five weeks as a psychiatric resident, as no psychiatrist but Paul Pitts, 22, recently discharged Air Force medical corpsman. Pitts faces trial for forging a diploma and impersonating a doctor.

¶To help them find out how much radiation the human system can tolerate, researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory picked convicts at Illinois' Stateville Prison. They have soaked up minute, detectable amounts because Stateville's water (from a deep well) contains 50 times as much radium as most U.S. water supplies.