Revolution Staged In Medicine

Northern Advocate, 30 April 1940, Page 4

Revolution Staged In Medicine

I do not know if the general public is aware of the revolution at present going on in the practice of medicine, writes Dr. Rodney Avon in the “Daily Sketch.” The art of healing has a history that reads like a novel; it has had its crises, its periods of suspense, its long decline, but never its fall. And the past hundred years have been the most dramatic of all, for one important discovery has fallen on another and scientific facts of fundamental importance have crowded out the flimsy beliefs of centuries. The result is something very satisfactory indeed, and every man, woman and child should know it. The present day may be the turning point in human affairs, and by some coincidence medicine is showing the way to a new and more satisfactory way of fighting disease and ending it. We are all out for health, first and foremost; the prevention and not the cure of disease is our object. But civilisation with all its artificialities and its unnatural elements, makes us pay the price of giving up our primitive, simple and naturallyresponsible way of living, and so we go down with ’flu or suffer from varicose veins.

Stumbled Into News. Who would have thought that the research chemist, Domagk, when testing in 1935 the effect of an azodye called prontosil and used for wool fibre, would have stumbled right into the news, and with heavy headlines, too? For this man rescued prontosil from its twenty-five-year-old tomb and brought it to life in its new capacity. He discovered that two important things happened. Prontosil killed the germ yet was harmless to the host. And so began a great new era in which it must be remembered that British doctors have so far been the big noises. The drugs of the prontosil group were tested oh various obstinate diseases, and gradually the value of the sulphonamides was everywhere appreciated. Do not regard the sulphonamidfes as a medical “stunt” or just the fashionable drugs of the day. These remedies have come to stay. Text Books May be Rewritten. The fact of their immediate and devastating effect on the members of the cocci group of germs—some of which, like the streptococcus, are the most virulent known—made them indispensable.

Remember that this is a revolution, and that erysipelas, meningitis, undulant fever and various affections have all been altered so much in their general course that medical text-books of even two years! ago may have to be rewritten.