Word: ulcers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ever since Boston's late great Surgeon Harvey Gushing showed that impulses from the brain, communicated through the nervous system to the digestive tract, could cause peptic ulcers, thousands of ulcer victims have had their vagus nerve severed by surgery to break the chain of cause & effect. It usually worked, but sometimes the ulcers recurred-presumably because mental stress had found a new route to the stomach, but how, nobody knew. Lately physicians have noticed that heavy doses of ACTH or cortisone may start old ulcers up again...
...Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, where Gushing did much of his work, a team of researchers headed by Dr. Seymour Gray put two & two together. This undesirable effect of ACTH and cortisone on ulcer patients, they reasoned, revealed a second pathway by which emotional stress reaches the stomach: through the pituitary and adrenal glands and their hormones. To test their theory, they gave ACTH to patients whose vagus nerve had been cut, and found that it made their poor stomachs react just as if the vagus nerve had been intact, i.e., the stomachs became overactive, secreted too much...
Naturally, say Gray and his colleagues, their tests indicate that precautions must be taken in ordering ACTH and cortisone for ulcer patients. They may also lead to a new understanding of how ulcers start and how they should be treated...
...Viscount Jowitt, the Labor government's Lord Chancellor; a Companionship of Honor for its Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison; a baronage for David Kirkwood, thistly Scottish labor leader; and a knighthood for Dr. Walter Fergusson Hannay, the surgeon who cleared up Attlee's foot eczema and his duodenal ulcer...
...investigators found that almost every one had been left motherless, or had been rejected or neglected by her mother. Every one had become unhealthily dependent on her father, husband or lover. Some overcompensated for their dependence by trying to reject men, but in every case an ulcer developed when the patient was rejected by the man she deemed essential to her happiness. The most striking difference between these patients and a similar group of men, the psychiatrists found, was that most of the men managed at least a superficial adjustment to their families and society. The women...