Manhattan Birth Control

In Manhattan last week, Dr. Hannah M. Stone and her associates who taught a woman how to control conception (TIME. April 39), were discharged in magistrate's (police) court. The magistrates decided that New York State laws permit a doctor to give birth control instruction when the doctor acts in good faith. Instruction may be to unmarried as well as married women, so far as the New York law indicates. Unsatisfied with freedom alone, the Stone group insisted upon knowing who instigated their arrest. They suspected Roman Catholics and said so. Police Commissioner Grover Aloysius Whalen avoided a direct answer. But he demoted the policewoman who had led the raid against the birth-controllers.

Nursing Anniversaries

After their ritualistic chores were done for last Sunday, Manhattan's Episcopal Bishop William Thomas Manning and Baptist Harry Emerson Fosdick proceeded that evening to the former's Cathedral of St. John the Divine. There theocrat and minister watched 2,000 trained nurses march up the aisle and take their rustling seats. Many a nurse wore the Red Cross uniform of crisp white dress and redlined blue cape. It indicated both that she had been graduated from a high school and that she had taken special courses in war nursing. Most of those at the Cathedral had served in the World War, a few in the Spanish-American War.

The occasion for the gathering was the 109th birth anniversary of the late great Nurse Florence Nightingale, the founder of trained nursing, who died in 1910.

May also marks the founding of the League of Red Cross Societies by the late great Henry Pomeroy Davison. Red Cross work is the outgrowth of Florence Nightingale's nursing British soldiers during England's Crimean War against Russia and of the Swiss philanthropist Henri Dunant's description of suffering in the battle of Solferino (1859). Formal organization of war nursing began at Geneva in 1864. During the World War, such nursing was well organized. Perhaps most efficient was the American Red Cross which Davison headed. In May, 1919, he persuaded England, France, Italy and Japan to join the U. S. in a League of Red Cross Societies. Now some 60 nations belong.

Typhoid

From snow-clogged central Manitoba last week went out the account of what an epidemic may mean to an isolated community. In early May typhoid fever appeared at Fort Churchill on Hudson Bay. The nearest hospital was 183 miles away at The Pas. A few patients got through the blizzard. Twelve, on a train, with three score nurses, physicians and railway employes, were snowed in. Three locomotives could not pull them free. Food grew low. Snow was melted for drink. Engine fires were killed to save fuel. Telephone poles were chopped down for more heat. After days a dog team passed by. The hungry trainload confiscated its provender. Rescuers brought food and medicine by horse and hand sleighs. Finally the blizzards subsided. Three engines managed to break through the drifts and help the first three lug the typhoid victims to hospitals. Only one patient died.

Typhoid statistics compiled by the American Medical Association last week indicated the steadily diminishing incidence of that disease in the U. S. Of 81 large cities nine* had not a single typhoid death last year. In 1927 there were seven such zero cities. One of them, Yonkers. has had no deaths from typhoid during four separate years. Another, Tacoma, last year had no diphtheria death, a remarkable effect of good public health administration. And Tacoma in 1927 had been the worst typhoid city of its northwest district. Memphis and Nashville have their distinction in the typhoid record. They had the worst rates per 100,000 population in the U. S.--15 for Nashville. 11.6 for Memphis./- Nearly as bad were El Paso (10.2) and Oklahoma City (10).

None of the six U. S. communities with more than one million population (Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia) had more than two typhoid deaths per 100,000. Healthiest section of the U. S. from the typhoid aspect is New England; sickliest, the east south-central region.

Almost as though to puncture any complacency this improving typhoid picture might create, the Government showed last week that cases, not deaths, of typhoid fever were increasing this year over 1928.

There were 206 cases in 46 registering states, whereas the same week last year there were only 155 cases. In 98 cities the comparative numbers were 46 and 25, a greater increase than the Government estimate.

Death by Prescription

When a tortured patient begs his doctor for a lethal drug to end the misery, what is the doctor to do? The patient may be mangled in an accident. He may have cancer, syphilis, some other horror. He wants to die quickly, painlessly. Will the doctor help? Always the answer is "no." But sometimes the action is, silently, covertly, yes; for, although ending another's life or helping him to do so is murder before the Law, an overdose of merciful morphine can always be defended.

Last week Germany's Reichstag and Ministry of Justice, bold in their new republicanism, seriously considered legalizing death by professional prescription. Advocates argued that euthanasia has become common in the Reich. Opponents pointed out that no one man has the moral balance to decide on another's death. It apparently did not occur to the German debaters last week that lethal decisions, before the act, might be left to a jury of physicians or to a court.

*Duluth, Elizabeth, Lowell, Lynn, New Haven, Springfield, Mass., Tacoma, Yonkers, Youngstown.

/-Memphis also has the worst U. S. murder rate, 60.5 per 100,000 (TIME, March 25).