Word: tonsil
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Buzz-Bomb. In Kingston, Jamaica, when E. M. Mamby yawned, a wasp zoomed down his throat, stung a tonsil...
...American Child Health Association made a tonsil study of 1,000 eleven-year-old children in New York City. Some 61% of them had already had their tonsils removed. A group of doctors who examined the other 39% solemnly advised that nearly half of them needed tonsillectomies. The exonerated half were examined by a second group of doctors, and nearly half of them were culled for tonsil removal. After a third examination by still another panel, there remained only 65 children of the original thousand whose tonsils were rated sound...
...association found little rhyme or reason in the doctors' decisions.* Dr. Bakwin seconds the association's conclusion that the current craze for tonsil removal "represents in the main a useless ' expenditure of time, effort and money." Further, he considers it responsible for many cases of pneumonia, bulbar poliomyelitis, deaths from overdoses of anesthetics (80 a year) and children's neuroses...
...harbors organisms of trench mouth, may develop the disease if his resistance gets too low from poor nutrition or a bender. Then a bacillus and a spirochete (and sometimes other mouth germs) work together to produce tender, bleeding gums (medical name: Vincent's stomatitis) or throat and tonsil infections (medical name: Vincent's angina). Mouthwashing with hydrogen peroxide is one of the commonest treatments. But treatment usually goes on & on in serious cases...
...researchers conclude that in the case of the five paralyzed children the tonsil operation was "the precipitating factor," warn doctors and parents that tonsil operations are dangerous during the poliomyelitis season (summer and fall), even though the disease "is not notably prevalent in a community." Probable connection between tonsillectomies and poliomyelitis: nerves injured by surgery are more susceptible to polio infection, so that the latent virus could travel readily from the injured throat nerves to the medulla oblongata, where the spinal cord enters the brain...