Medicine: Mumu & Virility

Many a Pacific veteran came home with the gnawing fear that he was less of a man. Reason for the fear was a popular belief that virility is impaired or destroyed by mumu (filariasis), a disease which 10,000 U.S. servicemen contracted in the Southwest Pacific. Doctors tried to reassure them, but some victims were convinced that the long, slim worms in their lymph glands would eventually cause elephantiasis (natives of the tropics who have it are grotesquely swollen masses of flesh).

To ease the brooders' minds once & for all, Captain Lowell T. Coggeshall, tropical disease expert of the University of Michigan, took a poll of mumu convalescents at an Army hospital near Klamath Falls, Ore. His finding, reported without comment in California and Western Medicine: mumu men have fathered twice as many babies as wormless veterans.