Word: reliefer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Such was the dominant belief until recently in the nation of free enterprise, rugged individualism and the Homestead Act. Only when the frontier was gone did city, state and eventually federal relief become a principal weapon against poverty. The force that most fundamentally changed the nature of poverty was the machine. In the short run, the industrial revolution only caused bigger and worse poverty by creating a new pauperized proletariat; in the long run, it lent reality to the Utopian dream of universal abundance by almost infinitely multiplying the once strictly limited productive capacity of human hands and brains...
...with a deep sense of pleasure and relief," said outgoing U.N. General Assembly President Alex Quaison-Sackey, resplendent in a Ghanaian toga of orange and gold, "that I welcome all representatives present." Relief was the operative word. It had been Quaison-Sackey's fate to preside over what Britain's Lord Caradon had rightly called the "lost session" of the U.N. General Assembly. Not since December 1963 had the Assembly been able to discuss issues freely or to vote on them. But as the white and lavender saris of Indians commingled with the rainbowed robes of Nigerians...
...Massachusetts General Hospital was dying of cancer of the pharynx and sinuses. No more surgery was possible, and he could barely tolerate the pain even when he was petting frequent injections of a morphine-type drug. Then, during the last three months of his illness, the tormented man found relief. His doctors tried a brand-new type of electrical treatment, and he discovered that he could switch off the worst of his pain simply by pressing a button on a little box in his shirt pocket...
Press-the-button relief depends on the fact that much perception of pain depends, in turn, on electrical nerve impulses passing through the thalamus, a junction box below the base of the brain. If the circuitry in the thalamus is interrupted or disrupted, even the in tractable pain of cancer may be allayed. The Ervin-Mark technique requires drilling holes in the skull (under a general anesthetic), then using elaborate stereoscopic instruments to place four electrodes at selected points in the brain, two of them in the thalamus itself. The electrodes are left in place and cause no pain...
...with electrodes and gave him a little transistorized stimulator capable of sending a weak current through his thalamus whenever he pressed a button, he cheerfully reported absence of pain after 15 or 20 minutes. If he kept the current on for 45 minutes to an hour, the pain relief lasted as long as six to eight hours and gave him a night of uninterrupted, pain-free sleep - an invaluable benefit. During the last six weeks of his life he used only a little codeine and relied heavily on his pain...