Minor Ailments

First student to enroll in Johns Hopkins Medical School for its opening in 1893 was Louis Philip Hamburger. From the able scientists on that faculty Student Hamburger learned a great deal about scientific medicine, not much about the minor ailments he was to meet in general practice. As a result Dr. Hamburger made a specialty of treating minor ailments in Baltimore. Today he lectures about them to Johns Hopkins medical students just before they graduate. Last week by means of the Yale Journal of Biology & Medicine Dr. Hamburger, 63, reached a larger and more learned audience with his views on trifling but pesky afflictions.

Dr. Hamburger doubts the efficacy of vaccines to prevent colds. He also points out that liquid vaseline placed in the nostrils of sniffling infants may drip into their lungs and cause pneumonia, warns against all mentholated preparations for infants' colds because the menthol may cause spasms in the infants' throats and choke them. To alleviate colds Dr. Hamburger advises rest in bed and a simple prescription equivalent of which is an aspirin tablet with a cup of weak coffee every four hours and a glass of water in between.* Nonetheless, he concludes: "More can be done specifically for pernicious anemia than for a cold in the head."

To treat simple tonsillitis Dr. Hamburger doubts the "utility of moppings and gargles," prefers applications of ice to the neck.

For coughs Dr. Hamburger praises paregoric, an old derivative of opium which children's specialists now say is dangerous. According to Dr. Hamburger, "Paregoric . . . was what [Johns Hopkins'] Dr. Osier took when he himself was ill with broncho-pneumonia." Habitual constipation, "excluding diseases of the intestines and adjacent structures," Dr. Hamburger declared "is usually an ill-conditioned reflex, often associated with the abuse of purgative drugs. Most of these patients can be cured by explaining how the mechanism of defecation has been deranged and by reconditioning them by persistent daily attempts at a fixed hour to move the bowels."

* An old English one: "The patient is directed to go home, hang his hat on the four poster [bed], proceed to drink whiskey quantum sufficit to see two hats."

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