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Sioux City, Iowa Sirs: I am wondering who the susceptible reporter is who covered the "Nerve Congress." Is she blonde or brunette and are all doctors of the Adonis type merely because they are doctors? I know a large number of doctors—and psychiatrists—of national renown, and I sincerely believe there is none among the group who has the faintest concern for his personal beauty.
JUDITH HAWLEY WINANS
Dallas, Tex.
Does any TIME reader contend that Drs. Penfield, Peet, Brickner or Adson is not handsome? A standing joke among U. S. physicians is the inexplicable fact that most U. S. brain surgeons are notably good looking.—ED.
Medical Brickbats
Sirs:
I read with much interest in TIME, Aug. 12, a letter from Dr. H. Maxwell Langdon in reference to cortin and glaucoma, and holding the opposite view from that of Dr. Langdon I dash madly to the rescue of beleaguered TIME. . . .
The so-called Old Guard in the profession of medicine believes that medicine should continue to be shrouded in the mystery of the Dark Ages; and that the layman has no business knowing what it is all about. If the doctor hands a patient a prescription written in the best medical Latin, it is the duty of aforesaid patient to hotfoot it to the closest apothecary shop: have same duly compounded as the Great Man has ordained; and take T.I.D. [ter in die, "thrice a day"] strictly according to directions. Not his to reason why. His but to get well if Mother Nature is willing; or to die.
But many of us so-called radical or progressive members of the medical profession are foolhardy enough to brave the wrath of the Old Guard of medicine—maybe it is a martyr complex or something—and speak right out in meeting.
I think both with law and medicine the public is entitled to know the essentials in lay language of any and of all new developments. All advances in medicine and surgery are experimental in nature until proven by time and experience and I think the more intelligent of our people understand this; certainly the class of people who read magazines such as TIME belong in this category.
There is more "professional" jealousy to the square inch in the practice of medicine than in any other vocation that I know of; all any doctor has to do is to announce some new and possibly better development in medicine or surgery and he will spend as much time dodging professional brickbats as he will in catching the few and far between bouquets from colleagues. I know this from sad experience, having had the temerity some years back of announcing a bigger and better operation for removal of the tonsils.
J. B. H. WARING, M.D.
Wilmington, Ohio.
Sirs:
It is obvious from Professor Langdon's letter in the last issue of TIME [Aug. 12] that he has fallen into the error of confusing adrenaline and the adrenal cortex hormone. . . . Indeed, adrenaline has long since been abandoned by many ophthalmologists as a dangerous drug in glaucoma. . . .