Sirs:
In your comment (Sept. 21) on what Mr. Herman Seydel is said to have called his "long-sought single cure for arthritis," you take occasion to characterize the American Medical Association as an organization which takes the "attitude that no one should know anything at all about anything which might not be good for him."Were TIME an irresponsible, anti-medical sheet, the statement could be ignored, but I have always felt that TIME, in its discussions of medical matters, is generally sound as well as sympathetic to the problems of the medical profession.
The attitude of the American Medical Association toward the unwarranted and harmful publicity of the Seydel pronouncement was predicated on two simple and, what seem to me, obvious facts: First, and by far the more important, is the cruelty of leading sufferers from any disease to believe that a remedy—which has not been adequately tested by the only group competent to pass on the question of its efficacy —has been found. The tragedy that follows the announcements of various alleged cures is little known except to the medical profession; sufferers in stages in which they could be helped by medical science, abandon treatment and follow the wills-of-the-wisp until the chances for recovery are forever gone; others bankrupt themselves or their families in order to try the new panaceas. The second fact in the Seydel matter is: There was no justification for a scientific body devoted to chemistry to permit itself to be used as an unpaid agent for ballyhooing a proprietary medicine. These were the only factors involved in the Seydel matter. . . .
ARTHUR J. CRAMP, M.D. Chicago, Ill.
Sirs:
Dr. Morris Fishbein takes indignant and autocratic exception to the publicizing of a speech by Chemist Herman Seydel (TIME, Sept. 21).
As one dumb layman who is much better versed in the pathology of alcohols than in the chemistry of benzoates, I am not qualified to comment on the chemist's claims. But as a' bored layman who is tired of all this prattle about professional ethics, and with the A.M.A. in its sanctimonious stand as the sole arbiter of human health; I am vaguely reminded of one Louis Pasteur, chemist, and of how the medical confession, in a united front, battled his method of inoculation with virus to combat and cure hydrophobia.
ELMER ELLSWORTH Los Angeles, Calif.
Dartmouth '31
Sirs:
After reading with interest the story of Harvard's Class of '11 (TIME, Sept. 14), it occurred to me that many of your younger readers might be interested in a class five years out of college, a class thrown out into the world in '31 at about the worst period of the Depression.
Dartmouth's class of '31, 448 strong, has not fared too badly. With only two or three exceptions every man has a job of some sort. This has been true throughout the Depression as practically everyone has either found or made a job for himself from the time he left college.