Word: ergot
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...fulminating affliction of the food, drug & insecticide administration of the Department of Agriculture, the "scandal" of ergot, came up again last week. Walter Gilbert Campbell, director of the department's regulatory work took it before the Senate Committee on Agriculture & Forestry. He wished to clear the administration of Dr. Henry Kurd Rusby's long repeated charges that it was willfully permitting the importation of rotten ergot, fluid extract of which (says Dr. Rusby) is killing large numbers of women in childbirth (TIME, April...
...Ergot is a rust on the heads of rye. Ergot extract is widely used in obstetrics, to cause contraction of the uterus and control uterine bleeding. The physiological action of the extract is not precise, a fault of many drugs of vegetable origin. Their composition is complex and variable. Hence physicians lately have been adopting more controllable products. In obstetrics, pituitary solutions refined from the pituitary glands >of animals are supplanting ergot. But great quantities of fluid extract of ergot are still used. The raw material reaches the U. S. from Russia (and Poland) and Spain (and Portugal...
...Rusby, 75, retiring (this month) dean of Columbia University's Department of Pharmacy, one of the revisers of the U. S. pharmacopoeia, reiterated to the Senate's investigating committee last week the well-known fact that Spanish ergot is better than Russian ergot. The Russian product until recent months has been wormy, lousy and rotten, due to careless handling. Only a low-grade and deleterious extract, says Dr. Rusby, can be made from it. He charged that the food, drug & insecticide administrator has been illegally admitting rotten raw ergot into the U. S. due to the blandishments of manufacturing pharmacists...
...other side of this tariff schedule rushed the coalition army, skirting the coal tar salient temporarily lest it be treacherously mined, but forcing ergot and crude chicle on the free list. Democratic Senator Steck of Iowa, weary from running from side to side in fighting, insisted that the tariff campaign promises of both parties must be thoroughly fulfilled...
...time of delivery or immediately after. Other mortal causes include lack of prenatal care. poor home conditions, general ill-health. Dr. Edward Joseph Hill of Newark, N. J.. tried to introduce the claim of Dean Henry Hurd Rusby of Columbia's Department of Pharmacy that rotten ergot causes many of these deaths (TIME, July 22). The American Association of Obstetricians, Gynecologists & Abdominal Surgeons (formal name of the Memphis conferees) assigned the topic to a special investigating committee...