Word: cortines
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Adrenalin & Cortin Sirs: In TIME, July 29, Medicine, you have an article on ''Cortin for Glaucoma." . . , I have been practicing ophthalmology since October 1902 and am one of the Professors of Diseases of the Eye in the Graduate School of Medicine in the University of Pennsylvania. I have a great many people afflicted with glaucoma under my care, and you have no idea the harm such an article does...
Adrenalin has been used in glaucoma for at least 20 years and in acute elevation of intra ocular pressure is a very helpful drug. The effect of cortin as distinguished from adrenalin is not definitely known at the present time. There is too little evidence to justify an article in a public magazine on it. It at present should be confined entirely to medical publications where the hopes of the public would not be unjustifiably raised and a great deal of emotional stress stirred up and the emotions have a great deal to do with raising intraocular pressure. Anyone...
...Since dictating the above, I have had two other inquiries concerning cortin - people coming in all buoyed up, thinking that something new had been discovered for them, and of course greatly disappointed when told that the whole thing was questionable and never should have been printed in public places. Many medical men have been conditioned to believe that their doings and thinkings enjoy a sacred immunity from the ordinary processes of human curiosity. Well does TIME know the problem of reporting scientific news, but its responsibility toward Science differs no whit from its responsibility toward news of other human affairs...
...every TIME-statement there must he either reliable witness or reputable authority. In this case, Dr. Langdon's quarrel is not with TIME but with Dr. Josephson whose report on cortin in Science, a reputable publication. TIME accurately reported. Whether public hopes rise or fall is the responsibility of Dr. Josephson not of TIME...
Such leakage occurs in glaucomatous eyes. Dr. Josephson reasoned, probably because the patient's adrenals supply too little cortin. He bought some cortin at a drugstore, injected it into the muscles of glaucomatous patients. Usually within half an hour eye pressure dropped to normal, tension and pain in the eyeballs ceased and many purblind patients could see clearly for the first time in years. Pursuing a hypothesis, Dr. Josephson gave cortin to nearsighted children. In most cases their vision also promptly improved. That must mean, he decided, that myopia and glaucoma are due to the same thing...