LENGTHENING LIFE

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 122, 19 November 1931, Page 13

LENGTHENING LIFE

CANADA'S GREAT PART

FOREFRONT OF DOCTORS

(From "The Post's" Representative.) VANCOUVER, 16th September. The average span of life in Canada has increased from 40 years in 1840 to 58 years at the preesnt time. This achievement has beeu duo to the progress of medical science, and education in disease prevention and health standards. Under the influence of Sir William Osier and his contemporaries and successors, the medical colleges of the Dominion have advanced to the front rank. M'Gill and Toronto are listed by the Rockefeller Foundation in the world's foremost group. Lord Moynihan, president of the Eoman Catholic Surgeons, last year said: "The medical school of the University of Toronto, in my deliberate judgment, has no equal." Faculties and research staffs of important institutes in other countries teem with Canadian names, graduates of Toronto, M'Gill, and others of our seats of learning; the famous John Hopkins School and hospital is saturated with Canada's exported skill. In fact, Osier, who introduced to the United States his original method of bedside clinical teaching, helped to found it. He died as Begins Professor at Oxford. Osier, in his M'Gill days, deliberately incurred smallpox in order to gain first-hand knowledge of its effects. Dr. W. D. M. Lloyd, when a young graduate of the University of Western Ontario, made some startling discoverieG of the effect of calcium chloride on the heart. Experiments on rabbits succeeded; would they succeed on man? He gambled with death by injecting a drug that stopped the beating of his heart. His assistant applied the calcium chloride; soon the daring experimenter regained consciousness. Dr. Lloyd is now in Brazil, doing experiment work for the Bockefeller Foundation. Working on live simians some little time ago, he contracted monkey fever. There is more than a little ground for suspecting it was not an accident. Dr. Klotz took chances with sleeping sickness in Africa. He "caught" yellow fever and survived to relate his professional impressions. At Dalhousie University, Dr. O. S. Gibbs fashioned an artificial heart, and made it function in a frame of glass. He removed a cat's heart and replaced it with the artificial one. The cat lived five hours. An artificial lung at Toronto University made by Professor C. H. Best, Banting's celebrated assistant, kept a breathless man alive twenty-two 'days. Under his supervision two months has been added to the pre-natal care of mothers. Dr. Bruce Bobertson brought home from the battlefields of Flanders his dramatic transfusion inspiration. Seeing hundreds of soldiers die from toxic blood, ho conceived the idea of bleeding them white and replenishing their veins and arteries with the clean, pure blood of healthy vigorous men stationed behind the firing line. Back in tho Toronto Children's Hospital he had the satisfaction of seeing hundreds of badly-burned children survive his experiment of pumping their bad blood from the soft part of the skull near the brain and replenishing it with good blood pumped in at the ankle before he passed on. Professor Collip of M'Gill discovered that parathyroids, small straggly bits of tissue the size of a bean clinging to the thyroid, often cut away in a goitre operation, controlled the calcium in the blood. To-day a surgeon would as likely remove them as he would cut off a patient's head. Collip has since made significant contributions' to the store of knowledge of sex hormones, another step in the struggles to reduce maternal mortality. Professor Babinovitch, of thei Montreal General Hospital, combined vitamins and iodized fatty acid in a standardised preparation; goitrous patients to-day have reason to bless his name. Dr. W. E. Gallic, Professor of Surgery at tho University of Toronto, transplanted live tissue from one part of the body to another; his exploit revolutionised tho treatment of hernia. Dr. F, F. Tisdall, of the Children's Hospital, Toronto, caught the summer's rays and put them into biscuits, as well 'as years on to the life of the infant. Dr. E. W. Archibald, Professor of Surgery at M'Gill, removed the entire diseased part of a lung, based on an operation he saw the famous Sauerhruch, of Vienna, perform. A perfect cure resulted. A battle against diphtheria- has entered its decisivo stage through the formula of Dr. P. J. Maloney, of the Connaught Laboratories, Toronto. But the greatest of all is Frederick Grant Banting, discoverer of insulin. "Banting," said Lord Moynihan, "wears with becoming humility the crown of immortality." All over the world, a great and steadily growing army may bo counted —the thousands, tens of thousands, soon to be hundreds of thousands —of men and women living useful, painless and happy lives. Before insulin they wore doomed. Professor M'Lonnan, of the University of Toronto, discovered helium, which is used for inflating dirigibles, and first mado it available in commercial quantities. During the Great War he was scientific adviser to the Admiralty^ . ]