Medicine: Home Remedy for Burns

To fight severe burns, modern medicine has experimented with all kinds of remedies—tannic acid (now in some disrepute), bandaging, baths, skin grafting, diet, even hypnosis. But the victim of an extensive burn (more than 10% of the skin) is in most critical danger from loss of fluid and shock. The standard treatment for this has long been to administer either whole blood or blood plasma intravenously. Since plasma is often not available and since it often contains hepatitis virus, doctors have been looking for a simpler remedy. Last week a team of U.S. Public Health Service scientists announced that they had...