Germs, Wounds, Vitamins

A new drug, a thousand times as powerful as sulfanilamide, excited members of the American College of Surgeons, who met in Boston for some clinical shoptalk last week. Other topics that absorbed the 3,000 visitors were the old problem of toughening up healing wounds, the vital question of surgery in Britain.

Gramicidin. Three years ago, Dr. Rene Jules Dubos of the Rockefeller Institute discovered a germ-killer brewed by bacteria that live in the soil (TIME, April 15, 1940). A product of chemical warfare between germs, the brew, called gramicidin, overcomes certain streptococci, staphylococci, pneumococci. In tests on animals and humans it is from 1,000 to 100,000 times as strong as sulfanilamide in healing local infections. One-millionth of a teaspoonful, as much as a drop of mist, is enough to protect a mouse from 10,000 fatal doses of pneumococci.

Trouble with gramicidin is that it also destroys red blood cells, once it circulates in an animal's system. Last week Drs. Charles Henry Rammelkamp Jr. and Chester Scott Keefer of the Boston University School of Medicine reported a hopeful experiment with gramicidin. Instead of injecting it into the blood stream they trickled a few drops of gramicidin right on the wounds of several patients with ulcers and skin diseases. One patient who had a leg ulcer for 15 years was cured in three weeks. The others recovered even more rapidly. But the doctors made it clear that the dangers of gramicidin have to be tested more completely. It is still available only to research workers, is made only in minuscule quantities.

Healing Arts. With sulfanilamide and quick blood transfusion, about 60% of wartime casualties with abdominal wounds recover, as compared to 38% in the last war. Otherwise, said Dr. Gordon Gordon-Taylor, Temporary Surgeon Rear Admiral of the British Navy, "there is little we have learned about abdominal wounds in this war that we had not already learned from the last war." Sidelight on civilian warfare: "Every maternity hospital in London was bombed but fortunately no patients were hurt while in labor."

If vitamin C is given to patients after operation and during convalescence, said Dr. Marshall K. Bartlett of Harvard, wound healing is several times faster, the tensile strength of new skin much greater. According to Drs. John Berry Hartzell and William E. Stone of Detroit's Wayne University, the vitamin draws calcium to injured tissues, helps weave cells tightly together.

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