The Gisborne Times PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27. 1911

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3333, 27 September 1911, Page 4

The Gisborne Times PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27. 1911

Some very important statements were made by Dr. Pockley in his inaugural address before the Australasian Medical Congress last week. It was his opinion, he said, that the discoveries already made and others foreshadowed were threatening not only to revolutionise the practice of medicine, but within limits to profoundly alter the inter-racial relationships of man and influence his distribution on the face of the globe. More than at any other time, he declared, the man who kept up with the march of medicine must avail himself in his daily work of the help given him by the scientist in his laboratory. They must, he urged, avoid the temptation to be lured on to the quicksands of speculation, but keep to the firm ground of proved scientific and clinical facts. He alluded in the course of his remarks to “one . notable and quite recent discovery,” which had, he said, caused quite a stir in the medical world. This was that by the great synthetist Ehrlich of a supposed cure for one of the most serious and loathsome and most universally distributed disease that had ever affected the 'human race. If its claims were sustained this drug would be noteworthy as being the only experimental one known with the property of rapidly destroying an infective organism of the blood without injuring the rest. The only other that

The March of Medicine.

had this power, indeed, was quinine, which destroyed the organism of mat- < aria, To-day the position as regards surgery, said Dr. Dock ley, was ’ *‘ l with tlie exception of some parts of the brain and spinal cord there were no parts of the human body sacred from the surgeon’s knife. Dp to 1909 there were one hundred and fifty recorded operations on the heart itself, vi 1 thirty-five per cent, of the patients saved from an otherwise certain death. One of the most notable of the recent advances in surgery was undoubtedly transplantation operations. There had already been successful, transplantation of nerves with restoration of function to paralysed muscles. Whole organs had been successfully transplanted in animals, and ere long it might be that this would be possible in the case of human beings. Dr. Pockley, it may be mentioned, averred that while sometimes small ulcers, etc., might be apparently cured by means of radio-ac-tivity,, it appeared that it could not cure or even benefit real cancer \ sometimes did more harm than good, and could not prevent spreading of the disease recurrence or metastasis. lalse hopes had, as a matter of fact, been raised in the minds of sufferers from ■various diseases, and while waiting foi radium many had put off till too late the operation which alone could have saved them. The conclusion was that at present the ..only rational method of treating carcinoma was by the surgeon’s knife, but suggested a remedy by cultivating immunity in the individual. There also had, Dr. Pockley continued, been a repetition of irresponsible writing that gave forth premature and unjustifiable statements of the curability of consumption by tuberculin, in consequence of which all roads to Berlin were now dotted with dead and with dying victims of this fell disease. It was his view that the danger that the dreaded yellow fever might reach these shores through the opening of the Panama Canal was not altogether imaginary. If a mosquito sucked the blood of an infected person, there was a latent period of twelve days before the insect became infective and capable of transmitting the disease to man, and a further incubation period of five days before a man so bitten would show the disease. The voyage from Panama to Australia might be accomplished in less than seventeen days. What might be a safeguard, however, was that yellow fever and the stegomyia had, it was believed, now been practically banished from the Canal zone. Dr. Pockley, in this regard, went on to say that unless science came to their aid in providing some means by which they could resist tropical influences above and beyond protozoal diseases, and if they were to believe in history and natural selection, it would appear to be inevitable that if they were to continue to hold the Northern Territory they must either let it remain unproductive or comparatively so, or they- must evolve some scheme by which they could develop it by using colored labor. Touching again on the disease known as tuberculosis, he affirmed that the dark nations were much more susceptible to it than were the whites, and if they lived under the same conditions as Europeans as regards' climate and overcrowding, their mortality would he still heavier. On the other hand, the dark races had been evolving a relative immunity to malaria and other parasitic diseases to which white succumbed. As reported by cable, he claimed “that there is no proof that alcohol causes racial degeneration, but all the evidence is the other -way, and “that the sane and proper course would appear to be to segregate the inebriate with the feebleminded, and prevent him from propagating his kind.” Dealing with the question of the unfit, Dr. Pockley asked : May not the undesirable characters of certain types be correlated with others for the absence of which the world would he the poorer? It would appear that it would have been far better to have let Nature manage this business in her own way. “But,” lie added, “'as we have ventured to interfere with the balance by restricting the natural increase of the fit, it seems that we are driven to* the adoption of some measures to limit the undue multiplication of the unfit.” Dr. Pockley concluded with a terrible indictment in regard to race suicide. Here '3 an extract from his remarks 011 the subject:—“ln the declining birth-rate and race suicide we see evidence of a loosening of the moral fibre of a community nurtured in self-indulgence breaking away from the guiding and r'estraiuyig influences of religion and finding no other monitor.” The best hope of remedying the present drift, he bold, would appear to lie in education £nd in the elevation of public sentiment. Such then is hut a brief outline of wliat will be agreed is a most interesting address.