Word: anemia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Disappointed Death leaves a glow of grateful wonder in the faces of those whom doctors cure. Doctors, who love to behold that wonder-glow, expected to see its quintessence last week in Philadelphia where Dr. George Richards Minot of Boston was scheduled to lecture on pernicious anemia at the Inter-State Postgraduate Medical Assembly. Dr. Minot, a diabetic, would not have been alive to discover the liver treatment for pernicious anemia and therefore to win a Nobel Prize (TIME, Nov. 5), if Nobel Laureate Frederick Grant Banting had not discovered the insulin treatment for diabetics. But Dr. Minot...
...which would best regenerate the marrow's red-cell powers. Before Drs. Frederick Grant Banting and Charles Herbert Best of the University of Toronto discovered insulin (1921), Dr. Minot kept himself alive by watching his diet. Dieting made him a food faddist. Faddism made him ask his pernicious anemia patients what they ate. Thus he discovered that most never touched meat or green vegetables. From Johns Hopkins' Dr. Elmer Verner McCollum, Dr. Minot learned that liver was rich in proteins and vitamins which stimulate the growth of children...
About that time (1924) Dr. Minot learned from Dr. Whipple, who soon became "my closest friend," about the effect of liver on secondary anemia. So with some confidence and Dr. Murphy's constant help, Dr. Minot began to feed pernicious anemics with liver. The results were too miraculous for hasty announcement. Drs. Minot and Murphy, with proper salute to Dr. Whipple, made their formal announcement...
Then Harvard's Dr. William Bosworth Castle discovered why liver helped anemics. Pernicious anemia, he showed, is a deficiency disease in a category with diabetes and myxedema. In pernicious anemia the stomach fails to secrete a certain substance which as yet has not been isolated. Ordinarily that stomach secretion mixes with food, especially meats, and produces a second, unidentified substance in the intestines. There the second unknown is absorbed and gets to the arm and leg bones where it stimulates the production of red blood cells...
...George H. Whipple of Rochester, N. Y., will also share in the award, as may Dr. Murphy, who assisted Dr. Minot, although it is rare to have the $50,000 reward split more than two ways. Dr. Whipple was experimenting with anemia in animals at the same time Dr. Minot was pioneering with anemia among human beings...