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"Now, there is no question that the medical profession as a whole is hostile to our point of view. No medical school or hospital, due to the attitude of those who should be the leaders, has shown any active or intelligent interest in our work. . . .
"Our answer to the medical profession is simple: It is up to them to clean house. From now on it is a fight to the finish between the medical profession and ourselves. There can be only one outcome to this contest. The medical profession will lose.
"We challenge the medical profession to make their tests of our treatment, with all experimental details released, on certain forms of alcoholism, insomnia and sciatica. These are selected because even a medical man should get good results the first time. . . .
"I know medical men say it would take 20 years to test our theory properly. I say it can be done in three months. Let the medical profession run fair tests with all details publicly released. It does not dare to make these tests because the results would show that we are right."
Up jumped Dr. Torald Hermann Sollmann, 60, professor of pharmacology & materia medica and dean of Western Reserve University Medical School to sneer that Professor Bancroft's experiments on rabbits and chickens were not sound. "How many of your associates are taking sodium rhodanate?" bantered Professor Francis Gano Benedict, 64, Carnegie Institution nutritionist.
Professor Bancroft: "There must be about 100 of us taking it for sleep. I have been taking it for two years, about a teaspoonful a week of a 10% solution. I now sleep quite normally, and my health and disposition are normal."
Slyly commented Professor Anton Julius Carlson, University of Chicago physiologist, who is 59: "The problem is not one of prolonging life, but of finding some way of easing out old men like you and me. God knows we have plenty who are dead and don't know it."