Word: lancet
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That poor food has some connection with poor hearing in growing children has long been suspected. Last week, in the Lancet, Dr. Phyllis Toohey Kerridge of London University bolstered up this theory by publishing results of her hearing tests on 1,000 English school children. Middle ear deafness, found Dr. Kerridge, "is about four times as common, on the average, under poor social conditions as it is under good social conditions; in the poorest places ... it may be nearly ten times as common as in a good environment, nearly a quarter of the child population being affected. Climate, housing...
...Some of our country towns have lately come to have a Continental look," wrote the editor of the British Lancet last week, "for every morning every window is filled with bedding hung out to air in the sunshine. The scene is cheerful, but the householders are depressed; for the habit of bedwetting, in guests who are likely to stay a long time, is a serious tax on hospitality. . . . Somewhat unexpectedly, eneuresis has proved to be one of the major menaces to the comfortable disposition of evacuated urban children . . . and at a time of widespread domestic crisis we make no apology...
Last fortnight the Lancet confidently asserted that British nerves were now strong enough and British planes good enough to make drink unnecessary. "During the war of 1914-1918," said the editor, "heavy drinking became almost a convention among flying men, and this convention lingered afterwards. It had arisen at a time when the inferiority of our machines compared with those of the enemy was felt to justify an infusion of Dutch courage, but now that its underlying cause has been removed it exists no longer...
Last January, when news of Dr. Segal's experiments reached England, the Lancet, world's most famed medical journal, promptly pounced on them. An unsigned editorial commended Dr. Segal's objectivity, delicately sneered at his conclusions, offered a highly original explanation for smokers' fatigue. Despite the "bounding vitality and missionary fervor" of the "heroes" who stop smoking, said the editorial, it is doubtful that the drug nicotine alone produces fatigue. There is a "feeling to which an extraordinary number of people admit, that they smoke too much-that cigarets are a waste of money...
Last week as this theory came back across the Atlantic, Dr. Segal stood up for his experiments, prepared to refute the Lancet's psychological argument. Pointing proudly to the beaming face of one of his "heroes" he said: "That Lancet editorial must have been written by an elderly pipe-smoking Englishman of the philosophical type...