Today's column calls upon the members of the city council and all other to join me in tendering heartfelt condolences once more to those members of the SPCA who are stiU blocking the council's order to supply universities, hospitals and other authorized research agencies with dogs to be used experimentally in furthering medical education and research.
The reason I send this message of sympathy to the aforesaid members of the SPCA—not that enlightened portion of the membership which no longer dwells in the medical ideology of the Middle Ages — is that despite all they could do to impede the advancement of healing in New Orleans, three heartless, bestial agencies who DO help mankind have just succeeded in conquering a stubborn and hitherto unsolved medical problem to the lasting benefit of all humanity.
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THE FRIENDS who achieved this are members of the facult yof LSU's medical school, scientists on the staff of the department of agriculture southern utilization laboratory on the lakefront, and officers of the surgeon-general's department of the United States Army. Working together they have managed to emulsify some of the fat components of cottonseed oil in such a way that the end product can be administered to very ill patients intravenously thereby providing nutrition which will tide the patient over the critical stages of illness.
Intravenous nourishment is presently administered largely in the form of soluble carbohydrates, notably solutions of glucose. But the calories which fats can make available to the human body are far more concentrated, a fact well known for more than half a century. Unfortunately, fat emulsions heretofore administered by intravenous drips have brought in their train highly harmful side effects—just as some of the earlier blood transfusions did in causing protein reactions before type classification had been perfected.
It is true that these harmful effects were observed following the intravenous introduction of fat emulsions on laboratory animals of various sorts, so that up to this good moment not even the new and apparently perfect emulsions has been used on human patients. I suppose that is because physicians, physiologists and scientists are—if you believe the reactionary wing of the SPCA—the sort of brutes who enjoy torturing poor
dumb beasts when they might be killing human beings experimentally, or else letting them die of the same diseases which carried off their forebears.
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AFTER ALL, isn't it better to let blue babies, diabetics, and other such "defectives"—even if their parents do love them —die than to let physicians carry out on laboratory animals like rats, guinea pigs, dogs, and hesus monkeys the experiments which perfected insulin, the blue-baby operation, Salk* vaccine, open heart surgery or even the substitution of artificial nylon blood vessels to replace hopelessly diseased sections of arteries?
Let me give you some background on the latest brutal success scored by New Orleans scientists, Dr. Rudolph Matas was, if I'm not mistaken, the pioneer who introduced the intra-venous drip to the practice of medicine. Incidentally, his epochal major discovery on the suture of aneurismal sacs had followed experimental suturing of the intestines of dogs.
One of Dr. Matas' favorite pupils, one who was at his bedside when the renowned surgeon died at the age of 97 two years ago, is Dr. Isidore Conn Sr., now retired from active practice. For decades Dr. Cohn cruelly served as staff physician without fee to Hope Haven, a Catholic institution for the rearing of boys; the Episcopal Children's Home of the Diocese of Louisiana, and the Jewish Children's Home, now no longer in existence, which gave shelter to the orphans of an eight-state area. He had other brutish characters, too.
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HIS SON, Dr. Isidore Cohn Jr., is now professor of surgery at LSU and was one of the major factors in the experiments which have finally achieved a feasible way of administering emulsified fats through the intravenous drip originated by his father's teacher.
In any case, it all comes down to this: Despite the best efforts of a relatively small segment within the SPCA to hamper and impede medical research in New Orleans, dedicated scientists of LSU, the department of agriculture, and the surgeon-general's section of the Army, have here achieved anpther great victory which will reduce human suffering and prolong precious human lives. I therefore tender sympathy and condolences to that wing of the SPCA on another failure—heaven be praised!—to obstruct if not to halt medical progres
