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Besides his work on pure chemistry Pope madevaluable contributions to the applied side of thesubject. His studies on the cyanins carried on withmembers of the Cambridge school gave the photo-graphic industry a serviceable group of sensitisingagents. During the last war, when the use of poisongases by the enemy forced us to retaliate, Pope intro-duced a new method for making mustard gas moresatisfactory than any hitherto used either by us orthe Germans.But perhaps his most lasting achievement was the

building up from a group of individualists at Cam-bridge of a first-class school of chemical research,which has since extended in many directions-bio-chemistry, physical chemistry, colloids and metallurgy,to mention but a few.

WHY NOT NUPERCAINE?

THE importance of having for every potent agenta name readily distinguishable from all others is sadlyemphasised by a fatality at Bournemouth. The deathresulted from the use of Percaine solution which wassupplied to the doctor who asked for procaine. Per-caine (Ciba) is of course much stronger than procaine,and it seems essential that if further like tragediesare to be avoided-and the above is not by anymeans the first--either "procaine" or "percaine"should disappear from our medical vocabulary.Procaine, though perhaps less familiar than theproprietary equivalents, Novocain, Allocaine, Neocaine,Planocaine and others, is the name officially applied tothe substance by the British Pharmacopoeia andshould presumably remain unchanged. But it mightbe possible for the manufacturers of percaine to selltheir product here under the name by which it isknown in the United States-namely, Nupercaine.It would then be easily distinguishable from procaineboth in writing and in speech.

J

EARLY HISTORY OF GAS GANGRENE

MAIsoNNEUVE is generally supposed to have beenthe first to separate gas gangrene as a distinct entityin 1853, but Dr. C. E. Kellett 1 has discovered a letterwritten by Fabricius Hildanus to Gregorius Horstiusin August 1607 which describes in clear and convinc-ing terms what was certainly a case of gas gangrene.A farm labourer of 50 was run over by a cart

wheel, which lacerated his left leg. Three days laterhe was seized with violent pain in the calf. " Ifound,"wrote Hildanus, " the whole of the leg below theknee gangrenous.... Furthermore as I began toshave off some of the hair above the knee on theouter aspect at a certain place I could make out asound as if there were some sort of empty spaceunderneath.... About ten that evening a vesiclethe size of an egg arose in his groin beside hisscrotum, black and filled with water like meat wash-ings. On opening this the underlying flesh was foundto be black and gangrenous : within the next twohours the scrotum became swollen to the size of ahead and became gengrenous. At about the thirdhour after midnight he became covered with sweat,at first hot and then cold, and died peacefully, in themiddle of a sentence, four days eleven hours after hisillness commenced, twenty-four hours after the onsetof the gangrene."

Hildanus was at the time an acknowledged authorityon gangrene, and had published a monograph on thesubject in 1593, but he was certain that his patientwas suffering from a type of disease with which hewas entirely unacquainted. Kellett believes that gasgangrene was rare before the middle of the 19th

1. Ann. med. Hist. September, 1939, p. 452.

century. He also suggests that up till then and forsome time later the common form was that known as

" hospital gangrene," which by 1874 was affectingsome 80 per cent. of all wounds treated in somecontinental hospitals, and that it was the conquest ofthis dire infection by the triumph of antisepsis thatbrought gas gangrene into a prominent place.

NEW YORK CONGRESS OF MICROBIOLOGY

LAST week our U.S.A. correspondent spoke of twointernational congresses which had been seriouslyaffected by the situation in Europe. One of thesewas the congress of microbiology held in New Yorkwhich was attended by over 1000 members from theAmerican continent, although the European visitorsnumbered little more than 15 from France and 35from Britain. Among the latter were Sir JohnLedingham, who presided at the previous congressheld in London three years ago, Prof. AlexanderFleming, Prof. J. R. Marrack, Prof. J. W. Biggerand Dr. Henderson Smith. With nine separatesections meeting each morning for five days the fieldcovered was very wide and many subjects of topicalinterest, such as air-borne infections, chemotherapy ofbacterial infection, and the relation of filtrable virusesto tumour formation, were discussed. While therewere no pronouncements of novelty or outstandingimportance the congress was useful in tidying up somewell-tilled fields. For example, the association ofpleuropneumonia-like organisms with rheumatic fever(Swift and others) had been shown by further workto be without the significance originally suggested.On the other hand Horsfall described the isolation ofseveral strains of virus from normal mice by passageof lung material, an observation with important bear-ing on experimental work in mice, particularly inrelation to influenza. Further, the efficiency of yellow-fever vaccine, which had in previous years beenregarded as almost complete, was shown by Soper andhis colleagues not to have been so successful recentlyin Brazil where a certain proportion of inoculatedindividuals had contracted yellow fever later.Although the scientific work of the congress may havesuffered from the absence of the usual foreign con-tacts, the conversation in the lobbies and the almostastronomic hospitality were fully appreciated by thosewho were there.

Mr. SETON PRINGLE, F.R.C.S.I., has been electedpresident of the Royal Academy of Medicine inIreland. Mr. Pringle, who is surgeon to the RoyalCity of Dublin Hospital, was lately president of theRoyal College of Surgeons in Ireland.

Surgeon Lieutenant (D) WILLIAM AUSTIN DICKIE,R.N., who went down with the Royal Oak, took hisL.D.S. in Glasgow in 1936 and was appointed to ashort service commission in the dental branch of theRoyal Naval Medical Service in February, 1937.

We regret to learn that with the September numberthe Birmingham Medical Review has ceased publica-tion until after the war.

Under the Cancer Act, 1939, local authorities wererequired to submit their arrangements for theprovision of facilities for the diagnosis and treatmentof cancer by March 1940. The Minister of Healthnow realises that local authorities have not been ableto attend to this matter in recent months, and thatit will generally be impossible for them to proceedwith any scheme submitted in the near future, so

he has extended the period to March 1941.