70 Years Ago
Study: Alcohol abuse is a disease that can be cured
BOSTON — There's new hope on the horizon for your drunkard kith and kin, say the authors of a pioneering 10-year-long study on alcoholism. Researchers at the McClean Hospital at Harvard found that this affliction — which they contend should be classified as a disease — is curable. However, after the age of 40, they found alcoholism becomes much more difficult to correct. The psychiatrists who authored the report also said that for an alcoholic to be cured he (the study was male-only) must sacrifice a year of his life for treatment and abstain from drinking completely for the rest of his days. Source: NEJM October 1937

71 Years Ago
Nobel laureate lauds virus-like protein
CAMBRIDGE, MA — There are creatures that live in the "twilight-zone" betwixt the living and the non-living — and they are our friends, said Nobel Prize winner Dr John Howard Northrop at the Harvard Tercentenary Conference of Arts and Sciences. These creatures, he said, resemble viruses only they prey on bacteria and therefore are beneficial to humans. The substance, which is best described as a germ-eating protein, can only multiply in the presence of living bacteria. Source: New York Times 11 September, 1936

88 Years Ago
MD: the Great War's great lessons for psychiatry
NEW YORK — The great mobilization for war in Europe has taught us much about the health of the general population argues Dr Pearce Bailey, a US army colonel and Chief of Section of Neurology and Psychiatry at the Surgeon General's Office. Dr Bailey says that about 16% of all men who passed though the army ranks were unfit to serve and "the unfitness was a static fact, not a production of war." A surprisingly high proportion of soldier health problems were neuro-psychiatric in nature. Dr Bailey's statistics revealed that there were eight very common problems among unwounded soldiers (listed in descending frequency): mental defect or feeble-mindedness, neuroses or functional nervous disease, psychoses, organic nervous diseases, constitutional psychopathic state, epilepsy, glandular disorders and inebriety. The doctor warns that this means that mental health in the community at large is a problem. "The army returned what the civil community offered it — nervously handicapped men," he said. Source: New York Times 14 September, 1919