Word: thyroid
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...club, the tension unavoidably brought out personality. A somewhat thyroid spinster from Lahore passed around the manuscript of a sex novel she had been working on. One handlebar-mustached old colonel, who had spent 40 seasons in Kashmir, refused to leave. Said he: "Good God, no! I'll just pull my houseboat over another mile or so and forget the trouble." The Hindu pianist who played an Indian version of boogie woogie at the houseboat-cabaret Bluebird had a different solution. He bought a new, heavy, imported Scotch tweed suit with heavy overcoat and tweed cap. Asked...
...elsewhere, surgery, radium and X rays are still the basic, most successful treatments. Some 90% of Memorial's patients are operated on (the hospital's "fiveyear cure" rate for stomach cancer: 25%). But Memorial is also pioneering in hormones for breast and prostate cancers, radioactive iodine for thyroid cancers, nitrogen mustards for Hodgkin's disease, radioactive phosphorus for certain forms of leukemia, a urine test for early cancer detection, studies of an extract of the adrenal gland, which looks like a hopeful candidate against stomach cancer...
From a cancer researcher's standpoint, the thyroid gland is an ideal organ to work on: it is easily reached with a test material-iodine-since it takes up nearly all the iodine fed to the body. It is also sensitive to atomic radiation. Researchers have found that radioactive iodine inhibits overactive thyroids; carefully measured amounts of it usually cure hyperthyroidism...
Blood-Stream Ferrets. If atomic radiation can inhibit a gland, why not a cancer cell? Dr. Rhoads reported that in some cases radioactive iodine does seem to control thyroid cancer. Exhibit A: at Manhattan's Montefiore Hospital a patient whose cancerous thyroid gland had been removed was discovered to have cancerous daughter cells from the thyroid scattered throughout his body. When he was given radioactive iodine, the radioactive atoms hunted down the cancer cells like ferrets...
Radioactive phosphorus has been tried against certain types of leukemia, a cancer of blood-forming tissues. But in most cases of leukemia and thyroid cancer, these treatments do no permanent good. (One reason: in thyroid cancer, the more malignant the cancer, the less prone it is to pick up iodine.) Dr. Rhoads believes that inorganic elements like iodine and phosphorus offer little real hope...