Word: insulin
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About 50% of the inmates of U. S. insane asylums are there on account of a deteriorated mental-emotional condition variously called dementia praecox, schizophrenia or split personality. Therefore the presence in Manhattan last week of a young Vienna psychiatrist, who cures such disoriented wits by means of insulin, created great stir among doctors, great hopes among relatives of schizophrenics...
Several years ago Dr. Manfred Sakel, 36, a University of Vienna psychiatrist, cured morphine addicts by dosing them with insulin. His theory: morphinism is due to too much adrenalin in the system; insulin counteracts adrenalin. By accidentally overdosing them with insulin, Dr. Sakel shocked some of his morphine patients into comas. When they recovered from the "hypoglycemic shocks," their personalities were remarkably changed. Since the problem of curing a schizophrenic is the problem of shaking up his ingrown personality, Dr. Sakel tried shocking doses of insulin on Viennese schizophrenics. Last week at the New York Academy of Medicine he frankly...
...Sakel cure is complicated, difficult and dangerous because the patient must almost die of insulin shock several times before he can collect and use his wits like a normal human being. Dr. Sakel applies his treatment in four stages. For two weeks or so, according to the patient's reaction, he administers increasingly large hypodermic doses of insulin. When the insulin doses become powerful enough to cause insulin shock (profuse sweating, coma), Dr. Sakel is ready for the second, or shock phase of his treatment. This consists of inducing coma for several hours a day for several days. This...
...clock, is in his laboratory exactly one hour later. Assistants do all the actual experimenting, for Dr. Loewi is remarkably clumsy, breaking almost everything he touches. This characteristic almost ruined Dr. Loewi's career a decade ago. He asserted that a certain substance inhibited the action of insulin in the body. When colleagues complained that they could not repeat his experiments, he admitted that neither could he because assistants on whom he had relied in the first place had made an error. His frankness in admitting his blunder put him back in the graces of fellow scientists...
...demonstrate that his thesis worked outside the laboratory, Dr. Blotner, 35, who strayed into this physiological bypath while trying to find out why diabetics cannot take insulin by mouth, performed the same experiment with digestive juice extracted by means of a stomach pump from healthy teetotalers. Natural gastric juices digested hard-boiled eggs in a few hours. Addition of alcohol completely arrested digestion...