The Science and Status of Medicine.

By the late 1930s medicine was well established as a science. The modern age of chemotherapy had arrived with the sulfa drugs, and the age of antibiotics was to come in the next decade. Hormones, insulin, and vitamins were used in daily life. Blood transfusion was one of the most common hospital procedures, together with a bewildering variety of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, including X-ray procedures, electrocardiographs, and basal metabolism techniques. In the first thirty years of the century public health measures had alleviated much human misery. Diseases such as typhoid fever, dysentery, and diphtheria were rapidly disappearing. Other diseases, previously unknown, were taking their place: allergies, diabetes, arthritis, and diseases of the peripheral blood vessels. There were still epidemics and some diseases, which, as one doctor put it, "many a research man would literally give his...