Mars, M. D.

The only full-scale medical convention of 1943 was held by the Association of Military Surgeons in Philadelphia last week. Some highlights from more than 130 papers and talks presented to the 3,000 United Nations Army & Navy doctors present:

> Most parachute injuries are leg fractures and ankle sprains. Captain William J. Tobin of Fort Benning reported that since the adoption last June of a new technique of landing with both feet together instead of shoulder-width apart (the old technique--see cut), parachute injuries have dropped from 1.54% to 1%. In 250,000 jumps since July 1940, there have been only nine deaths.

> Major Donald William Ingham of the Medical Service, Camp Crowder, Mo., reported 700 cases of rheumatic fever (heart disease caused by streptococcus infection) at two Army posts. The disease is also frequent in the Navy. Lieut. Colonel Irving Sherwood Wright, chief of medicine, Army and Navy Hospital, Hot Springs, Ark., said that rheumatic fever cases should never be returned to duty; they are often germ carriers, always poor risks if put on heavy jobs. Average cost of an Army rheumatic fever case: $25,000.

> Dr. Paul Dudley White of the Massachusetts General Hospital contributed what he called a "cheerful note": he finds that angina pectoris patients survive on the average eight years or more (after the first attack) instead of the generally accepted three-year period. Of 497 patients whose cases he has followed, average survival is already eight years and many are raising the average with every breath.

> Captain Warwick T. Brown of the Fleet Marine Force in the South Pacific Area reported a new cure for the tropical ulcers the size of 50-c- pieces or bigger which soldiers contract in tropical countries. The drug: azochloramide in alcoholic solution.

> Brigadier General Charles Clark Hillman of the Surgeon General's office, who recently returned from the Southwest Pacific, concluded his talk with a significant hint that experiments to find a new antimalaria drug are bearing fruit.

> Colonel "Randy" Lovelace is the big, mild, ex-Mayo-clinic man who last July made the world's longest parachute jump 40,200 feet). Colonel Lovelace announced that by next year the U.S. will have 100,000 airplane ambulance beds. Latest released figures on air ambulance transport were given by Lieut. Colonel Richard Meiling of the Air Surgeon's Office: since the autumn of 1942, the Air Transport Command has evacuated, by air, 125,000 patients. In one area, the 12th Air Force moved 25,000 sick & wounded with only one death en route.

> Brigadier G. B. Chisholm, brilliant head of the Canadian Army's medical service, is the only psychiatrist to hold such a job. (Philadelphia's famed Dr. Edward Strecker thinks all Army medical services should be headed by psychiatrists.) Brigadier Chisholm called soldiers' mental breakdowns "a disability of the English-speaking peoples. . . . A whole generation has been taught not to fight. From earliest childhood a boy is trained not to run risks so as not to break his mother's heart. . . . The result is that in the Army there is an emotional attitude toward getting hurt." Brigadier Chisholm recommends drill as one safeguard against nervous breakdown because 1) it gives a man a feeling that he is part of a group, 2) it reduces him temporarily to the condition of a child for whom all decisions are made. After a good dose of drill, a man can be rebuilt to use the special fighting asset resulting from the English-speaking way of life: individual initiative. A few percentages on U.S. mental casualties also came out at the conference: 20 to 25% of the casualties in one battle area were neuropsychiatric, but of these, 60 to 80% were able to return to the front after the Army's short, forward-area treatment (TIME, Sept. 13); more than 45% of Army medical discharges are neuropsychiatric.

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