(4 of 4)
"laboratories should be available to
the family physician for service to the family of the employe."
Figures presented to indicate the extent of the field of factory
medicine: 3,000,000 "lost time injuries," 25,000 deaths, 87,000,000
minor injuries, from industrial accidents yearly. Cost:
$5,000,000,000 a year. "Cancer is Curable." During the past
two years Fellows of the College of Surgeons, at the insistence of
Dr. Franklin H. Martin, an organizer of the College* have been
keeping track of cases of cancer which have remained cured for five
years or longer. Last week the surgeons reported a total of 24,448
five-year cures. Of the total 7,990 have been cancer of the womb, 8,051
cancer of the breast, 1,506 cancer of the mouth and lip, 1,124 cancer
of the skin, 2,067 cancer of the colon and rectum. The knife, x-ray and
radium
effected these cures because the patients reported and their physicians
recognized the cancers before much destruction had occurred. This was
the point which the surgeons wanted impressed on everyone. Dr. Robert
Battey Greenough of Boston, who later in the week was elected 1934
president of the College, presided over the symposium on cancer, in
which 30 eminent surgeons shared. One of the best attention-holders
was Dr. Robert Calvin Coffey of Portland.* Ore., a swarthy, beetling
man who was called upon to describe his famed system of draining the
kidneys through the intestines in cases where the bladder is diseased.
Dr. Coffey also described his system of "surgical
quarantine." When he operates on a diseased abdomen he blocks off
healthy organs with sheets of rubber and packs cotton wicks into the
hollows left by organs removed. As the patient's insides heal and
connective tissues fill in the cavities, Dr. Coffey hauls out the wicks
one by one. His method helps insure against peritonitis.
Appendicitis. Mortality from appendicitis is 50% higher today than it
was 15 years ago, deplored Professor Alton Ochsner of New Orleans.
One person dies in the U. S. every 29 minutes from appendicitis.
Before the age of 50 four times as many people die from appendicitis as
die from cancer. Ages 10 to 30 are the appendicitis years, 70% of cases
occurring in that range. Added Dr. John T. Moore of Houston, "Many
times a patient with an acute attack might get over it, if nothing
were given in the way of a purgative."
*Of Nashville and Vanderbilt University too is Professor
Eugene Lindsay Bishop, 47, last week at Indianapolis elected 1914
president of the American Public Health Association.
*Recently published is Surgeon Martin's two-volume
autobiography, The Joy oj Living (Doubleday, Doran $7), which yields
flashing glimpses of the important surgeons of the past half century.
*No kin of Dr. Walter Bernard Coffey of San Francisco who
still claims to be alleviating hopeless cancer with adrenal cortex
extracts (TIME, Nov. 23, 1931 et ante).
