MEDICAL PROGRESS

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 7, 8 July 1931, Page 10

MEDICAL PROGRESS

A LIFETIME'S ADVANCE

TEACHING HOSPITALS

■At the meeting in London of the Ladies' Association of St. George's Hospital, at which Princess Mario Louise presided/ Dr. James Collier spoke ou the recent ' development in medical treatment.

Ho had been for more than forty years concerned with medical treatment in the hospitals of London, and ho marvelled at the changes which had taken place'■ Tkcre • was the disappearance of somo diseases, a change in tlio incidence of others, and there was the cure of a number of diseases onco regarded as incurable. There was less pain ana suffering, and there were also better conditions of service for those who administered to the patients. There, was little doubt that the incurable diseases of the present time would be the brilliant successes of the future. They had had within recent times the cure of, pernicious anaemia due to a discovery by a doctor who did not follow the routine path and fed his patient on liver. Now, Dr. Wilkinson, of Manchester, had found something more remarkable than liver from the stomach'of a pig, which was produced in a food which needed only to be taken once a day.

They had recently in the hospital a strange case of a girl 16 years old who was a skeleton, weighed- 4st, and had a dark blue face, and who could not take food without tremendous diseonir fort. She was treated by thyroid and insulin with success and completely cured. In this way formerly incurable diseases wero being gradually struck off the incurable list. One of their house physicians .who laid got a scholarship at tho Lister Institute had succeeded in inoculating a horse with infantile paralysis. That horse now lived a life of luxury owing to the value of his blood as an injection, and if this could have been done years ago many lives would have been saved both here and in America. '

Speaking of the personnel of a hospital, which,- owing to the amount that was now known about diseases, largely, consisted of specialists, ho said that the students in a teaching hospital were specially valuable for the keenness which, they added to the work in tho wards; they were- the specialists in learning, and'ho himself always said that if ho was seriously ill he would like to be treated in tho open ward of a teaching hospital, preferably tit. George's—though he would not like to bo wakened at, 5,30 a.m. to be washed.