Hot Box; Hot Bag

Although they do not know precisely how they accomplish their cures, doctors are finding such astounding success from pervading the sick body with high heat that a physiotherapeutic vogue is now under way. About 100 technical papers have already been published concerning the methods of instilling the heat and fully that many papers are ready for publication. In Detroit last week staff men of the Henry Ford Hospital told the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology about a hot box designed by Dr. Walter Malcolm Simpson of Dayton and President Charles Franklin Kettering of General Motors Research Corp. From Dayton Dr. Simpson published a report in last week's American Journal of Surgery about his success with a hot water bag which Dr. Charles Robert Elliott of Seattle-San Francisco-&-Manhattan invented for treating the diseased female pelvis.

Ancient is the topical application of heat for medicinal purposes--Hippocrates' hot douche, hot baths, poultices, hot water bottles. The physiological basis for the body-heating vogue is the recently recognized fact that fever is the result of the body's effort to destroy disease. Hence fever should be judiciously encouraged and seldom, but never hysterically, fought. In 1917 Julius Wagner von Jauregg of Vienna, experimenting with artificial fevers induced by deliberately infecting patients with malaria, found that such artificial fevers brought about improvement and occasionally cures in the cases of people whose brains had been softened by syphilis. After malaria cured the syphilis. Professor Wagner von Jauregg cured the malaria with quinine. For such learned ingenuity he won a Nobel Prize. Since then he and a host of others have created those beneficial fevers with drugs, other germs and harmless proteins.

In 1931 Director Willis Rodney Whitney of General Electric's laboratories found that his body grew hot from an accumulation of high frequency waves when he stood in the path of a short-wave radio sending set. Out of that observation, Director Whitney developed the radiotherm, a boxlike device permeated by short waves in whose field a sick person might lie and develop a high artificial fever.

Mr. Whitney's radiotherm attracted the attention of General Motors' Mr. Kettering. Mr. Kettering, an inveterate tinker, took that first radiotherm to the Miami Valley Hospital at Dayton, where Dr. Simpson could experiment with it. It cured cases of syphilis (thus making Professor von Jauregg's troublesome malaria treatment obsolete), gonorrhea, rheumatism, colds and other ailments. But when the feverish patient broke into a sweat, the high frequency current tended to arc, thus burning his wet flesh. Mr. Kettering overcame that difficulty by fanning the patient dry with a blast of hot air from a new air conditioner which he was developing.

One day the Simpson-Kettering radiotherm broke down. The patient retained his high temperature in the hot blast alone. That meant that the radiotherm was needless for artificial fever. Dr. Simpson and Mr. Kettering designed a big coffin-like box in which the patient could lie with his body enclosed and his head exposed to fresh air. Hot air (160DEG F.) raised to a humidity of 50% to 60% blew over the patient's body. The heat-regulator in his brain allowed his internal temperature to rise to as much as 106DEG. This new Simpson-Kettering system has cured syphilis, gonorrhea, gonorrheal arthritis.

Last week at Detroit Drs. Frank Wilbur Hartman. Robert Carlyle Major and Howard Philip Doub of the Ford Hospital said that it cured tuberculosis in animals, that they hoped to use it on tuberculous humans. It may also aid in the cure of pneumonia. It did cure, in conjunction with xray, one special case of cancer of the bone. However, none of the experts connected with this hot box is yet boasting of its accomplishments. As a fever maker it is still an experiment. One Simpson-Kettering hot box costs about $1,200. Mr. Kettering considers the box a private philanthropy. He leases boxes to "responsible" doctors at a low rate.

The other body heater in the news last week is no longer an experiment. "Responsible" U. S. doctors have bought 2,000; "responsible" hospitals, 400 (cost: $195 each). It has cured some 300,000 women of pelvic diseases since 1920 . Then Dr. Elliott invented it to ease a diseased San Francisco woman of pelvic pains. But only since 1931 when Gynecologist Frederick C. Holden of Manhattan took it up, has its fame and use spread.

Essentially the Elliott device is a soft rubber bottle which fits into the vagina. A finely regulated pump forces hot water into the rubber bag, distends it and with it the vaginal walls. Every ridge, fold and interstice of the vagina thus absorbs heat. By small steps a thermostatically controlled heater raises the water in the bag to 130DEG F.

That the interior of the body can stand 130DEG F. is Dr. Elliott's fundamental contribution to Medicine. But the discovery was an accident for he is not an experimentalist.

Although the vagina can be heated to a temperature of 130DEG, the body's general temperature rises no more than four-tenths of a degree, as circulating blood carries the heat to the surface of the body where it escapes rapidly.

The mechanics of Elliott local heat is not entirely clear. The heat definitely weakens and kills germs throughout the female genital apparatus. It also increases the exudation of mucus from neighboring membranes. That mucus is somewhat germicidal. The heat dilates local blood vessels, making their walls thinner than normal. Dilation allows more blood, bearing germ-killing leucocytes, to flush through the diseased organs. The thinned walls allow swarms of leucocytes to get out and attack the germs of disease.

Gonococci most frequently infect Fallopian tubes and ovaries; streptococci and staphylococci, the uterus. To cure such infections in women, doctors used to be obliged to resort to surgery. Dr. Virgil Sheetz Counsellor of the Mayo Clinic, recently told his colleagues that he cured 73% of such inflammatory cases with the Elliott treatment applied an hour a day for two to three weeks. Dr. Simpson in his last week's account reported 90% cures without surgery.

Success in the pelvis led to Elliott treat-ment of other body orifices with other shapes of rubber bags. Dr. James Malcolm MacKellar, assistant chief surgeon of Englewood, N. J. Hospital, treats sinusitis that way. He inserts a rubber sack the diameter of a lead pencil through each nostril to the top side of the soft palate. Each tube contains a partition which allows a steady flow of hot water. Sinus pains speedily cease as the water circulates. With another kind of Elliott rubber bag, Drs. John Henry Morrissey and Leo L. Michel of Manhattan, and a thousand others, are heat-treating abscesses of the teeth, inflammation of the gums, post-extraction pains and blockade of the parotid glands.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.