"Loud"

One Dr. W. A. Evans, health writer, last week criticized the medical data in Sinclair Lewis's novel Arrowsmith (TIME, Mar. 23, BOOKS) Said he:

An eight-year-old girl has had laryngeal diphtheria several days. Dr. Arrowsmith finds her "struggling for each terrific breath." Instead of doing a tracheotomy instantly, he dashes to Leopolis 24 miles away, for antitoxin. He should have operated on the spot.

At a certain fire, a fireman is suffocated from smoke. His pulse was beating and he was breathing. Dr. Arrowsmith gave him a hypodermic of strychnine and held ammonia to his nose.

Giving him a hypodermic of strychnine at best was a useless procedure. It may have done him harm. All the man needed was air. Had it been at hand, inhalation of a mixture of oxygen and carbonic acid might have been called for. At any rate, that is what should be found on ambulances today. In all probability this fireman did not need even that, since he does not seem to have been much knocked out. The use of ammonia might have been justified, particularly after the man was moved well away from the smoke, but even it is doubtful.

When Arrowsmith was the health officer of Nautilus, he closed Klopchuck's dairy--the best in town--because he found one employe with a streptococcus sore throat, and three cows with streptococci in their udders. There was no evidence of streptococcus sore throat among the patrons of the dairy. A thoroughly unjustified procedure I The proper procedure was to pasteurize the milk from Klopchuck's dairy and to remove this employe and perhaps also the three affected cows from the plant.

In controlling an epidemic of plague on an island in the West Indies Drs. Arrowsmith and Sondelius burn a Carib village.

A wasteful procedure! The rats in the village were infected, but also were the animals in the jungle all around. Even though the fire killed all of the rats in the houses (which it would not) there remained the teeming jungle population also infected.

The description of plague infected rats is poetical and legendary but inaccurate. "They danced comically before they died." "Springing up as though they were trying to fly and straightway falling back dead."

A doctor who writes for a newspaper, is not necessarily a charlatan. He may be using his specialized knowledge, not for the exploitation of his name, but with the sincere purpose of promoting a better understanding of the body. But since this specialized knowledge is possessed, to a greater or less degree, by thousands of his confreres, gentlemen who make no fanfaronade of what they know, any doctor who writes for a newspaper is, indubitably, "loud." Dr. Evans writes for 70 newspapers. His querulous and meticulous criticism of Dr. Arrowsmith is unsound on the following score:

Diptheria. Instead of operating, as Dr. Evans suggests, Dr. Arrowsmith might also have used an intubation tube and sucked out the membrane. What he did is part of his character development.

Suffocation. Dr. Evans forgets that the incident took place ten or twelve years ago. What Dr. Arrowsmith did was quite in accord with the therapy of his period. The carbonic oxygen treatment was not then known. Even now, few small town fire departments are equipped with the apparatus.

Rats. How many plague-infected rats have been observed by Dr. Evans? On what authority does he state that small creatures do not dance, attempt to fly or even to sing, under the dreadful propulsion of their final torment?