At the Congress of American Physicians & Surgeons in Washington last fortnight and at the American Association for the Study of Goiter in Memphis last week, staff men from the great medical clinics remarked dolefully about the falling off of business, especially goiter business. Not enough patients are going to the Mayos, the Criles, the Laheys to keep the plants running at efficient capacity. Doctors have had to be discharged, forced into envious private practice. Brothers William James and Charles Horace Mayo are easing the transition for their discharged men by giving each a home and a year's salary.
The Mayos, expert medical economists, do not agree with the run of the profession that Depression alone explains the lessened incidence of goiter. Like Dr. George Washington Crile in Cleveland and Dr. Frank Howard Lahey in Boston, the Mayos built a large portion of their clinic activities on goiter operations. Dr. Henry Stanley Flummer of the Mayo staff was the outgoing president of the American Association for the Study of Goiter last week. Dr. "Charlie" Mayo was on the program for a dissertation on thyroid deficiency, a commonly unrecognized disorder. Their interest in goiter has forced the Mayos to investigate the real causes for the falling off of their goiter business. They had a goiter survey made of Minnesota. There were actually fewer goiters in that goitrous State than any prior survey had shown. To the astonished surveyors it did not seem possible that Minnesota goiters had been operated or medicated out of existence. Unless depressed and worried existence prevented goiters, it seemed probable that five, ten years ago the State and the nation were in a goiter epidemic. If so, the epidemic now seems passed.
The florescence and subsidence of goiter is only one of the many unknown facts about the subject. At Memphis last week two dozen men read papers about goiter—from Dr. George Everett Beilby (Albany) on "Toxic Diffuse Goiter in Children" to Dr. Samuel James Waterworth (Clearfield, Pa.) on "Pre-and Post-Operative Treatment of the Plus-Four Bad Risk Goiter Case."
Goiter is fundamentally a thyroid enlargement. To the thyroid function cheery Dr. Crile has tried to apply his electronic theory of life (TIME, Dec. 5. et ante), a theory to which his colleagues listen with aseptic indulgence. Said Dr. Crile in Memphis: "What we eat is radiation. Our food is so much quanta of energy, not in that inert word calories, but quanta. The sun shines upon our food products, and the sun shines secondarily within us. in the body's protoplasm. Energy contained in food is put there by the sun's radiation on the atoms of plants. Atoms are the vehicles that are filled with solar radiance as so many coiled springs. These countless atomfuls of energy are taken in as food. This life-sustaining radiation releases electrical currents for the body's electrical circuit or nervous system. Once in us, these tense vehicles, the atoms, are discharged in our protoplasm, the radiance furnishing new chemical energy, new electric currents. So what we eat is quanta of radiation and currents of action."