Still a Mystery

When Sir Augustus d'Este (a cousin of Queen Victoria*) fell ill, he made a careful note of his symptoms: he saw double, could scarcely balance himself, felt weak all over, and parts of his body were numb. That was in 1822, and for a century and a quarter, physicians could do nothing more for the illness he described than to give it a name: multiple sclerosis. There are at least 250,000 victims in the U.S. alone; most are disabled by it in the prime of life. D'Este, a typical case, lingered for 26 years.

The National Multiple Sclerosis Society has now summed up five years of fund-raising and fact-finding on the mysterious crippler. Of $813,000 raised, one-fourth has been used to educate both doctors and laymen in the ways of multiple sclerosis; $388,000 has gone into research. So far, nobody knows what causes the nerve sheaths in the spine and brain to degenerate, so that nerves become useless. But Manhattan's Neurological Institute is working on the possibility of an allergic origin for the disease; Tulane University is checking the viruses as possible culprits.

ACTH and cortisone have been tried on patients in both Boston and Manhattan; they do not look promising. At half a dozen clinics, patients are getting up-to-date physiotherapy to make the disease less crippling. Federal funds are being used to continue some long-range research which the Society started. No pat answers are in sight. Victims of multiple sclerosis have to be satisfied with an assurance of something less: their disease is at last getting the attention it deserves.

*Through his father, Victoria's uncle, the bookish and liberal-minded Duke of Sussex, who outraged King George III by marrying Lady Augusta Murray, a commoner. The old king declared the marriage void under the Royal Marriage Act. The son took one of his family's ancestral names, d'Este, and never tired of trying to win recognition from the British Court. He was fobbed off with a Hanoverian knighthood.

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