"A Greater Mankind"

Although the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis last week dealt mostly with physics, chemistry and mechanistic sciences (see p. 28), so many reports dealt with medicine and its contributory sciences of biology, zoology and anthropology, that Dean Alphonse Mary Schwitalla of St. Louis University School of Medicine, in a speech of welcome, enthusiastically cried:

"A year hence, ten years hence, perhaps 50 years hence, some one will trace the newer methods of medicine back to this meeting, perhaps to some seemingly insignificant announcement which even during these days may escape our immediate attention, but which the future history of science will reveal as profoundly influential in the destinies of mankind.

"Such a science builds the large out of the small, resurrects a greater mankind out of misery and suffering, transmutes truth into happiness, takes the patient plodding of the laboratory worker and converts it into human smiles and laugh ter." The A. A. A. S. confirmed Dr. Schwitalla's enthusiasm by electing Princeton's Biologist Edwin Grant Conklin to be president year after next. Among the reports which years hence may contribute to a "greater mankind'' were the following:

Brain Centres. That certain areas of the brain are connected with thinking, seeing, hearing and the other special senses is definitely known. That every muscle has a representative spot in the brain has been supposed, but never demonstrated conclusively until Edmund Jacobson of the University of Chicago thrice pushed a sharp wire into the brain of a normal man and found that an electrical current resulted every time the man closed his jaw. The experiment was possible because a bone tumor had necessitated removal of three square inches from the top of the man's skull. Dr. Jacobson's needle, therefore, perforated only scarred scalp to plunge one and a half inches into the living brain. Because this experiment harmed the man not at all, Dr. Jacobson hopes to perform "further experimentae cruciae" to learn precisely what happens in the brain when a person makes a movement, and then possibly what to do in case of paralysis.

Brain Power & Age. Frank Nugent Freeman of the University of Chicago stated: "Bright children do not develop much faster than average or dull children, nor do they continue their mental growth to a later age, as is commonly believed."

For Asthmatics. Noel Franklin Shambaugh of the University of Southern Cali fornia has cured some sufferers from asthma by giving them drugs to loosen phlegm in their lungs, then having them assume a head-down posture. In that position, they hacked, coughed and spit for three minute periods morning " evening until asthma left them entirely.

Angina Soothers. Angina pectoris, terrifying pain in the chest usually due to disease of the heart's coronary arteries, may be soothed by snuffing a small quantity of a crystalline substance called trichlorethylene -- John Christian Krantz Jr., University of Maryland.

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