Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who called himself Paracelsus, was a riproaring, swaggering Swiss who in his short life (1493-1541) completely upset the medieval practice of medicine. He learned medicine and surgery “from executioners, bathkeepers, gypsies, midwives, and fortune tellers and incidentally acquired an unusual knowledge of folk-medicine and a permanent taste for low company.” He believed in gnomes, sylvans, sprites, salamanders, macrocosms, microcosms. He knew botany, alchemy. He feared no man and he broke the laws of his profession, his Government and his God. Before he died as the result of being stabbed in a tavern fight, Paracelsus had bullied European doctors into using chemicals in scientific fashion.
Mystics believe that Paracelsus’ soul frequently descends to the U. S. for conventions of the American Medical Association and for conventions of the American Chemical Society. If so, Paracelsus was in San Francisco last week, listening to members of the American Chemical Society discuss the following useful current events in chemotherapy.
Lead v. Cancer. To the indignation of other cancer specialists who have found lead treatments ineffective for cancer, Dr. Arnold Erwin Osterberg & associates of Rochester, Minn. insisted that they cured seven cases of hopeless cancer by giving the patients enough lead phosphate to poison them. Before the patients lost control of their wrists or went mad, Dr. Osterberg gave them intravenous injections of calcium salts. This procedure overcame the effects of lead poisoning, expelled the lead from the patients’ systems. By that time the cancers had begun to disappear, eventually vanished. The chemistry back of Dr. Osterberg’s medication is that lead phosphate seems to have greater affinity for cancerous tissues than for normal tissues, accumulates in the cancers in lethal amounts before the general system is fatally poisoned.
Tuberculosis, Asthma, Colds. Extracts of the adrenal glands, chief exhilarators of the human system, prevent tuberculosis, cure asthma and common colds, Dr. Francis Marion Pottenger of Monrovia, Calif. reported. But, an asthmatic child needs the extract from five to 20 steers for a single month’s treatment, an asthmatic adult the extract from 20 to 30 steers. For lack of steers, Dr. Pottenger begged chemists to hurry invention of synthetic adrenal hormones.
Pantothenic Acid, apparently the one essential to the growth of all living substances, has been isolated by Professor Roger John Williams of Corvallis, Ore. All he possesses weighs less than half a drop of water. Yet that driblet is enough to lead to the synthesis of the potent stuff. Dr. Williams believes that pantothenic acid, a tiny amount of which has a remarkably stimulating effect on the growth of plants and single-celled animals, may be the long-hinted clue to why cancers grow so wildly.
Microanalysis. By means of capillary tubes which require microscopes to tell when they are properly filled and a tiny iron-filled glass ball agitated by an electromagnet to stir the contents of the tiny glass vessels, Drs. David Glick and Gerson Ravinson Biskind of San Francisco made micro-analyses of microscopic bits of human tissue. Thus they learned that the middle part of pituitary gland contains Vitamin C (found in oranges, lemons, tomatoes, peppers, spinach) in more concentrated form than any plant or other animal tissue. The fore part of the pituitary, the adrenals and the ovaries also contain heavy Vitamin C concentrations. Concentration in the ovary reaches its height as the ovum ripens. That relation suggested to Drs. Click & Biskind that Vitamin C may be involved in the formation of sex hormones.
Fertility. Lettuce, cotton seed and whole wheat contain comparatively large quantities of Vitamin E, according to its discoverer, Dr. Herbert McLean Evans of Berkeley, Calif. For lack of Vitamin E otherwise normal female animals, and probably women, cannot have babies. But they regain their fertility immediately after resuming proper meals. Dr. Evans & associates have just proved that this vitamin is a rare alcohol, which they now hope to make artificially.
Artificial Radium. By means of a powerful electromagnet Professor Ernest Orlando Lawrence of Berkeley can in ten hours’ operating time instill as much radiant energy into a speck of common table salt as $2,500 worth of natural radium contains. The chief difference is that whereas natural radium, a deadly poison, will retain its radioactivity for thousands of years, radioactive table salt will lose all its potency within a few hours. During the period of its radioactivity, however, such table salt may do as much medical good as natural radium, and probably without harmful effects.
Sheep’s Wool & Sex. “We have a positive cure for homosexuality,” exclaimed Professor Leopold Ruzicka, a Swiss organic chemist who lectured at the University of Chicago this summer. In 1931 Dr. Adolf Butenandt of Danzig discovered in the urine of men (and some women) the hormone which establishes masculinity in men (and some women). That male sex hormone was named androsterone. Last year Professor Ruzicka manufactured androsterone from cholesterol collected from the grease of sheep’s wool. Last June Dr. E. Laqueur of Amsterdam discovered still another, more potent male sex hormone. Professor Ruzicka now expects to make the Laqueur sex hormone artificially “within a few weeks.”
Meanwhile doctors over the face of the earth, experimenting with Chemist Ruzicka’s artificial androsterone, have told him enough to warrant his claiming: “By the injection of the hormone, normal sex desires can be awakened and will be accompanied by certain physical changes. The hormone, further, can be used in reducing enlargement of the prostate gland; common in elderly men.”
*Soon as the news reached Manhattan, Memorial Hospital, U. S. headquarters for cancer information, warned: “Lead therapy was abandoned at Memorial Hospital after extensive experience. The general toxic effects were found to be too severe. It can be stated that no method of combating the chronic toxic effects of lead has been found. . . . No new results of newer lead therapy methods seem to justify raising new hopes.”
More Must-Reads from TIME
- L.A. Fires Show Reality of 1.5°C of Warming
- How Canada Fell Out of Love With Trudeau
- Trump Is Treating the Globe Like a Monopoly Board
- Bad Bunny On Heartbreak and New Album
- 10 Boundaries Therapists Want You to Set in the New Year
- The Motivational Trick That Makes You Exercise Harder
- Nicole Kidman Is a Pure Pleasure to Watch in Babygirl
- Column: Jimmy Carter’s Global Legacy Was Moral Clarity
Contact us at letters@time.com