Medicine: Capsules, Nov. 29, 1954

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¶ Tic douloureux, a form of facial neuralgia often rated the most painful of afflictions, has been relieved for as long as two years by a drug called stilbamidine, taken orally or by injection, reported two Maryland doctors. Previous treatments (cutting a facial nerve or deadening it with alcohol injections) left the patient with no sensation or "phantom" sensations on one side of his face.

¶ For unusually nervous wives, Chicago's Dr. Walter C. Alvarez offered a prescription: "Learn to live a day at a time, forgetting old unhappinesses and not worrying about the morrow. Go to bed at 9 p.m." For their husbands: "Help in the kitchen at night will do the woman immensely more good than an operation.

¶ A lead toward development of a vaccine against measles was reported by famed Virologist John F. Enders (TIME, Nov. 1) of Boston's Children's Medical Center: he thinks he has trapped the elusive measles virus and got it growing in tissue-culture tubes. If this is confirmed, further steps would follow along the lines that led to the Salk polio vaccine.