Medicine Battles Death

A Remedy for Diphtheria

Ever since scientists discovered penicillin, researchers have been laboring diligently in search of its like. It is known, of course, that penicillin was extracted from the family of plants known as the fungi, among them bread mold. Researchers therefore turned to the other kinds of fungus, searching them for something new. They turned likewise to the bacteria, and extracted from them the new drug now known as streptomycin — or rather, they extracted it from a kind of organism that falls between the fungi and the bacteria.

Both penicillin and streptomycin kill many of the microbes that enter the body and cause it to sicken with various diseases, such as pneumonia, gonorrhea, festering wounds, and many others.

And now news comes from Russia that they have extracted a substance like penicillin — extracted it from the red corpuscles in the blood of the rabbit — and have found it effective against many microbes, and above all against diphtheria.

This was announced by Dr. Badin, the secretary-general of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences.

They have named this new substance "erythron," after the red blood corpuscles, and have now distributed it to the clinics and hospitals for trial; it has given promise of a measure of success sufficient to allow it to pass from private trials to general ones.

Coffee Does Not Prevent Pregnancy

It is a common notion that coffee prevents a woman from conceiving, and that if she conceives while keeping on with her coffee-drinking, the infant comes into the world stunted and weak. On this account four physicians at Erie University examined the matter. They examined it in rats: they took their young, then weaned them, and made their sole drink water sweetened with sugar and containing some of the active element found in coffee — the same one that is in tea — whose name is "caffeine," or, if you like, call it "coffee-ine" or "tea-ine." Alongside this they carried out another experiment, in which they gave the young rats pure water to drink.

And they found that the rate of growth in the rats of the first experiment was the very same as the rate of growth of the rats in the second experiment, even though the caffeine a rat took in the first experiment was the equivalent of 24 cups of coffee or tea in a single day.

If this is true — and if it is true that people are like rats, and rats like people — then no man, and no woman, need any longer be kept from drinking coffee and tea by the fear of weakened sexual power or of harm to the unborn child.

Good News for the One-Eyed

When a man's eye is ruined, he ordinarily resorts to an artificial eye, with which he fills the socket of the eye that was ruined and left empty. He tries to have this artificial eye resemble its sister; so he chooses it — or, more exactly, the doctor chooses it for him — as like as can be to his sound eye. But one thing tells people that this eye is artificial: it does not move.

The new news is that Dr. Rodman, at the Cleveland Clinic in the United States, has made a new eye of plastics with which the one-eyed man's socket is filled. And because it is pliable, he was able to attach it to the muscles behind the eye — they are four — so that it has come to move with the sound eye: left and right, downward and upward.