Halfway Up From Bedlam

Since World War I the population of New York's mental hospitals has grown from 35,724 to 73,120. There are now 20 of them. They are huge aggregations of depressing buildings, usually in secluded parts of the State. Behind their screened terraces and barred windows the patients who have committed themselves or who have been committed live in the empty world of insanity.

Behind the case histories of each one of the 4,421 patients at Creedmoor, the 8,634 at Pilgrim, the 7,117 at Central Islip, the 5,855 at Rockland--in the padded violent cells and in the disinfected halls--there are human stories. The ache of ceaseless fear and the agony of ordered purposelessness are ever present in these crowded wards.

How good are U.S. mental hospitals? They are not as bad as the 18th Century Bedlams, which were a cross between a filthy jail and a callous human zoo; but they are nowhere near up to the humane and efficient standard of U.S. hospitals proper. This was the gist of a report made last week by a New York State Commission.

The commission, appointed by Governor Dewey after the Creedmoor scandal last May (TIME, June 7), has been investigating New York State's mental hospitals. Head of the commission is smart Lawyer Archie 0. Dawson. Findings:

P: New York's mental hospitals are about as good as any in the country, but that is not very good.

P: Too often the insane are neglected, friendless, locked out of the way and forgotten. The people who care for them are often callous and incompetent and make sick minds worse.

P: Population of U.S. mental hospitals is rising rapidly--not because insanity is increasing but because more of the insane are being committed to State hospitals. Many arteriosclerotic and senile people who used to be cared for at home or in county institutions are now sent to State hospitals.

P: Some hospitals do not use insulin or electric shock therapy because of staff "inertia."

P: Tuberculosis death rate is thirteen times as high as that of the general population. Measures to control tuberculosis in mental hospitals are generally inadequate. P: Nursing methods are not standardized, nurses are often "careless," usually overworked. The nurse shortage is increased by "the privilege accorded to officers of the institutions to demand an unlimited amount of special nursing care for members of their households."

P: Only five of the State's 20 institutions have trained dietitians. One institution which had plenty of eggs customarily gave patients only bread and coffee at breakfast. In most of these institutions potatoes are usually the only vegetables served.

P: Many hospitals are very old--some go back to the 1860s. Others are poorly designed. Worst fault: lack of outdoor exercise yards.

P: Overcrowding is almost universal. At Craig Colony for epileptics, crowding is so bad that mattresses are spread on the floor of the Day Room at night. "The contrast between these crowded buildings and the cow barn, where the dairy herd of the institution is kept, is marked."

Pregnancy Test

Dr. Abner Irving Weisman of New York's Jewish Memorial Hospital and Christopher William Coates of the New York Zoological Park last week told a New York Academy of Medicine meeting that a sample of a pregnant woman's urine injected under the skin of a female Xenopus laevis (African Clawed Frog) makes the frog lay from 100 to 500 eggs within eight hours. If the woman is not pregnant, the frog does nothing at all. Weisman & Coates have worked with the frog since 1939 and find it better than rabbits, mice or guinea pigs (because it is faster) or the embarrassing bitterling (TIME, Jan. 7, 1935), a fish of great promise until Weisman & Coates discovered that it blushed as readily at male urine as at anything else.

The experts said that a hundred or so U.S. institutions now use Xenopus, and that a farm in Ardsley, N.Y. is growing frogs so that more hospitals can use them.

Eye Giver

Richard Bienvenu, a 33-year-old New Orleans broommaker, was nearly blind from childhood. Last week, for the first time in years, he saw faces. One face he saw was Mrs. E. E. Johnson's of Marrero, La., who had given him her blind right eye.

Doctors used Mrs. Johnson's clear cornea to replace one of Bienvenu's cloudy ones. Said Mr. Bienvenu: "Thank you." Said Mrs. Johnson: "I'm glad it came out all right."

Zenith Zooms

In five months, Zenith Radio Corp.'s inexpensive ($40) hearing aid (TIME, Oct. 4) has made the firm the biggest manufacturer of hearing aids in the U.S. Last week the company reported that it makes 1,000 hearing aids a day, more than all other manufacturers combined. (Altogether, U.S. manufacturers made 120,000 in 1943.) Retail sales were strong too. One Manhattan optical shop sold five or ten hearing aids a day in January, when Zeniths first came in, now sells a steady two a day.

A few prospective buyers are deaf to Zenith because of its low price. (Most good hearing aids cost over $75.) But Dr. Walter Hughson, a hearing expert who has an otological laboratory in the Abington (Pa.) Memorial Hospital, says there is no reason why an inexpensive aid should not be perfectly reliable. Said he in a recent report in the Archives of Otolaryngology: "A hearing aid comparable in every respect to any modern commercial instrument except for general appearance and housing can be built at a cost of $19 for all essential parts, not including labor." Since making that statement, he has examined the Zenith and says it is "very excellent." He is now making tests to see how durable it is.

No hearing device is very pleasant or very comfortable to wear at first. But in both size and sound transmission, Zenith, like other modern high-priced aids, is a big improvement over oldtime devices. They can be tuned for pitch and adjusted for volume. A good hearing aid can increase volume by as much as 50 decibels.*

Most oldtime hearing gadgets were not only feeble but massive. Many would rather be deaf than use them. In the collection at the College of Physicians' Mutter Museum in Philadelphia there are such monstrosities as an Aurolese phone with a headpiece like a miniature airtight stove, a snakelike ear trumpet, with a scoop intake, the 1896 "London hearing dome" with grilled receiver. At the Philadelphia Society for Better Hearing is an 1894 "hearing fan" to collect sound and vibrate against the teeth. This makes the user look silly but is efficient because sound waves brought in contact with any part of the head skeleton are conducted to the ear. That is one reason why people with dental fillings sometimes receive radio programs through their teeth and why some deaf people like to bite on their Sonotone earpieces now & then just to marvel at the racket.

*A decibel is the least difference in amount of sound perceptible by the human ear.

Four-way Infusion

Navy doctors call it "fourway infusion." Working on marines wounded at Guadalcanal, surgeons found that some patients would bleed to death if they waited for plasma to dribble in through one tube, developed a quicker method of transfusion. Last week in Manhattan Captain French Robert Moore, a surgeon who is a veteran of Guadalcanal and Tarawa, described the new method.

To restore a bleeding man's blood volume quickly, surgeons run plasma into the veins of both arms and one leg, salt solution and glucose into the other leg. Blood is substituted for plasma as soon as donors can be found.

Captain Moore cited two cases:

P: A marine had a wound of the lower chest in which a bullet was deflected through the liver, shattered the right kidney, went through the fourth lumbar vertebra (lower back) and left a large wound in the right flank. He was given plasma at the front line and on the way to the field hospital. But when he arrived at the hospital he was almost dead. A four-way infusion was begun. In two and a half hours, the marine got twelve units of plasma, eleven pints of blood, 1,000 cc of saline and glucose. That stabilized his blood pressure for his operation, after which he was given three units of plasma and two of blood. He lived.

P: Some sharp object had ripped through an aviator from the spine nearly to the navel. He was near death when he arrived at the hospital 20 minutes later. In two hours, surgeons gave him twelve units of plasma and ten pints of blood. Two months later the captain saw him in a West Coast hospital and he "looked pretty good."

Said Captain Moore: "If a man is losing blood, you have to put blood back in him."

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