Word: massart
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Last week a young American scientist began treatment at a Brussels hospital with full confidence that his severe radiation burns could be cured. What had happened to change the outlook so hopefully was a chance discovery made by Belgium's Dr. André Massart...
Head of medical services for the personnel at Euratom, the Common Market's organization for research into peaceful uses of atomic energy, Dr. Massart is largely involved in treating colds, sprains and peptic ulcers rather than radiation injuries. It was pure hunch, he says, that was operating in 1959 when he was called on to treat a young Belgian technician who had badly burned his right hand with an estimated 70,000 r. of radiation...
There were festering sores on two of the technician's fingers, and some doctors were already recommending amputation. But Dr. Massart was reminded of other stubborn, non-healing sores that he had seen, mainly on aged and debilitated patients; he remembered that such sores had responded to injections of callicrein (Kallikrein in Germany and trade-named Padutin by Bayer), a byproduct of insulin extraction. Why not try the same stuff on the radiation sores? Medical scientists had always considered radiation burns distinct from all other types of injury. Naive or not, Dr. Massart figured that there was little...