Ergot Controversy, Ended

As far as the medical profession is concerned, that shrewd controversy raised by Howard W. Ambruster, Manhattan importer of crude ergot, and Dr. Henry Hurd Rusby, Columbia University pharmacologist, as to the purity of ergot used obstetrically in the U. S., is ended. The American Medical Association last week published a 10,000-word review of the entire dispute from its beginning in 1927 (when Mr. Ambruster secured a "corner" on Spanish ergot) through the Senate investigation of the Food, Drug & Insecticide Administration last summer (TIME, July 14 et ante).* In passing the report revived its old comment on Dr. Rusby: "His experience in the practice of medicine seems practically to have been limited to one year's employment as clinical clerk in a lunatic [sic.] asylum some thirty [now 44] years ago. This may help to explain Dr. Rusby's weird conceptions of the anatomy of the female pelvis."

It also flayed Dr. Edward Joseph Ill, "personal friend and neighbor of Dr. Rusby for a great many years," "honest and well meaning" Newark, N. J., obstetrician. Dr. Ill, in the name of the Association of Obstetricians, Gynecologists and Abdominal Surgeons, supported the Ambruster-Rusby denunciations of commercial ergot preparations.

Thoroughly damned was Mr. Ambruster, thoroughly praised was the Food, Drug & Insecticide Administration.

As frosting to this unsavory pastry the Journal added the suds of an 800-word editorial: ". . . It is a pity that scientific workers should be compelled to pause in their pursuits to evade the buzzing and pestering of the musca [fly] Ambruster. . . . The Journal . . . will continue to devote little of its interest ot space in the future to unfounded charges, to insinuations without evidence, to the calling of names, or to cacoethes scribendi [itch for writing] on the part of any commercial assailant."

* The Senate committee, which included Senator Henry Drury Hatfield of West Virginia, a doctor of medicine, is to make its report this autumn. After this A. M. A. article, the Senate report will be an anticlimax.

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