the arduous processes carried out in the laboratories to extract penicillin. It is necessary to determine the nature of the injury and the degree of sensitivity of the injured organ with respect to penicillin, and the proportion of penicillin in the blood is checked again and again, so that the doses injected into the patient can be varied.
All the doctors I spoke with praised penicillin in the highest terms, and said: our task is to save lives so that the war can be won. In cases of injuries to the joints and the spinal cord, and of deep wounds, penicillin renders splendid services, and the soldier returns to the performance of his duty in the shortest possible time.
Among penicillin's brilliant results are those achieved in cases of the venereal diseases, such as syphilis, whose treatment used to require more than 18 months — then its method of treatment advanced, so that it came to require six months; and with penicillin it can be treated in seven days only. Gonorrhea, likewise, can be treated in a single day. And if the world can produce sufficient quantities
of penicillin, all the venereal diseases can be wiped out.
How strange that this magic medicine should be the outcome of a little mold that slipped into a London hospital through an open window!
Society holds that marriage is more necessary for the woman than for the man... A man may live a bachelor his whole life long without feeling any embarrassment or deficiency... but the girl who remains a spinster feels a great lack that embitters her life... From the scientific standpoint, however, the matter is the very opposite... for the man has greater need of marriage than the woman, to safeguard his health and give his body immunity from disease...
Statistics show that the number of deaths among bachelors between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-five is double the number of deaths among married men at that stage of life... As for women, the death rate among spinsters at that age exceeds the death rate among married women by no more than 10 percent. It is as though marriage doubled a man's health and strength, while adding to a woman's health and strength only a trifling increase.
• The ribbon-decked sea serpent — Fishermen weave many legends about the huge bearded whales and about sea serpents. There has lately been exhibited in the Natural History Museum in Chicago (the fish hall) a great, huge, ribbon-decked fish that might be called a sea serpent, and the fishermen there have taken this fish as proof of their legends. This fish has been described as snake-like, 50 feet in length and weighing approximately 250 kilograms, striped with a flame-like red crest running from its head to its tail, and with black lines, so that to one who studies it the fish appears as though clothed in hair or feathers.
• The modern ink pen: — At the Reynolds international pen company in Chicago they have made an ink pen of aluminum which can write without interruption, on a single filling of ink, for two weeks; and if you write with it ten minutes a day it will serve five years before you refill it. It ends in a small steel tip from which the ink neither streams too freely nor drips; it therefore writes cleanly and saves a quantity of ink.
• Preserving pipes from corrosion: — The industrial and chemical-engineering company has tried a new chemical process for preserving metal pipes running underground from corrosion. Wires of magnesium are buried near the pipes; the pipes and the wires then take the form of a battery, an oxidizing current runs between them, and the wires corrode away while the pipes are preserved.
• An artificial storm to fight insects: The chemical company in New York has made a new machine whose work is to create a storm of air laden with insect-killing substances.