Next - the International Medical Year
Neuberger, Richard L.
Next — the International Medical Year by RICHARD L. NEUBERGER "The groundwork of all happiness is health."— Leigh Hunt, 1821. Ihave a proposal which I believe might stir all mankind. We have...
...Radio microphones were placed at strategic intervals to catch every word...
...Hill's son received his name...
...Yet, I would confidently declare that one of the truly auspicious events of our era is the ever-increasing support of research on the frontiers of medical science by the U.S...
...Now, what of an International Medical Year, to be held beginning early in 1961, under the auspices of the newly-inaugurated President of the United States...
...Yet what could have a more favorable and enduring impact on our friends overseas than clinics to reduce the tragic rate of infant mortality, to cope with malaria, to eliminate the bacteria-nurtured diseases which snuff out so many young lives in Asia and Africa before even the age of 35 is reached...
...This is particularly true in the realm of politics, where Cassandra-like wailing can become an occupational disease...
...I rejoice that some of us recently were able to secure Congressional approval of adequate salaries for these gifted men and women...
...Research is carried on here by some of the nation's most eminent medical scientists...
...Mary Lasker, the beautiful and wealthy founder of the National Health Education Committee, whose presence in Washington is almost invariable when Senator Hill and some of the rest of us are fighting for adequate funds to support the National Institutes of Health...
...At least two dozen reporters thronged the press tables...
...He had studied in London under the great British scientist, Sir Joseph Lister, and this is how Dr...
...Some wretched racketeer from a strife-ridden labor union was on the witness stand, testifying reluctantly to his thefts from the union membership...
...I thought of the vast panoply of communication which has been brought to bear on a labor racketeer's testimony upstairs...
...And, although Soviet medical education is quite a bit less thorough than ours, Russia today is producing four times as many doctors annually as we do: about 25,000 as compared with 6,000...
...They described the direction which cancer research ought to follow during the years directly ahead...
...Russia has 164 doctors for each 100,000 people as contrasted with our 130 per each 100,000...
...My wife and I had as our guests two nurses from the fine teaching hospital at the University of Oregon Medical School...
...The huge marble hall was crowded...
...Mary Lasker and a few of her personal friends...
...This would afford time to prepare for the undertaking...
...He has rallied bipartisan support for his pioneering efforts in health legislation from such responsible Republicans as Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine...
...The author of the Hill-Burton hospital act and other medical legislation comes by his interest as a matter of rightful legacy...
...The vast potential significance of this idea was brought home to me recently when I read the letter of a young American doctor, Thomas A. Dooley, treating natives in the swamps of Vietnam...
...Perhaps this overwhelming challenge helps to explain my answer when people ask for my opinion of the outstanding legislative feats with which I have been associated...
...Lister Hill works successfully with other people, for a humorous and kindly disposition affirms the sincerity of his solicitude for human suffering...
...These citizens—and many others— could give vitality to America's participation in an International Medical Year...
...His father, Dr...
...And we in the United States cannot afford to ignore the increasing number of deaths in this country each year from cancer, climbing steadily from 211,000 in 1950 to 250,000 in 1957...
...In addition, the National Institutes provide substantial grants to medical schools, clinics, private laboratories, hospitals, and other places throughout the 48 states where promising avenues of medical exploration have been opened...
...There was not one newspaper reporter, not one TV camera, no microphones, no flash bulletins, no communication to the public from the green-felt table where Doctors Ravdin and Farber were somberly testifying...
...The witnesses were two of America's foremost doctors, Sidney Farber of the Children's Cancer Research Foundation, and Isador Ravdin of the American College of Surgeons and University of Pennsylvania...
...The efforts of the government in this category center at the National Institutes of Health, in the green Maryland countryside near Bethesda...
...6.1 24.0 Neurology & Blindness 7.6 29.4 Shamefully enough, the budgets of the Eisenhower Administration literally, on occasion, have recommended reductions in appropriations for the National Cancer Institute...
...In that room, besides four or five of us from the Senate, were our two Oregon nurse guests and Mrs...
...In a world racked by war and rumors of war, hopeful tidings often escape public notice...
...16.6 45.6 Cancer...
...8.2 31.2 Allergy, etc...
...Instead, I reply: "The vast increase in appropriations for medical research generally and cancer research in particular...
...New mountains of ore were discovered, to say nothing of 40 per cent more ice than anybody thought existed in the Polar regions...
...1.9 7.4 Arthritis...
...21.7 75.2 Dental Health...
...We have just concluded the International Geophysical "Year," during which the nations of the world spent some 18 months studying the earth and its environment...
...And I thought, too, of the 250,000 Americans who had died agonizingly of cancer in 1957, and of the hundreds of helpless child patients under Doctor Farber's care for leukemia, the deadly cancer of the blood...
...It seemed to me, in this moment, that an International Medical Year, centering in our own country where skills exist so abundantly in the realm of medicine, might help to achieve many purposes...
...government...
...Another effective lieutenant is Mrs...
...But Senators who had seen such illustrious colleagues as Vandenberg, Taft, Mc-Mahon, and Neely die lingeringly of cancer, would not hold still for this kind of economy...
...They expect me to enumerate spectacular bills such as statehood for Alaska, repeal of the federal freight tax, or funds for the 1,000,000-kilowatt John Day Dam on the Columbia River...
...Here is how federal funds for the various separate divisions of the NIH have been progressively expanded in the four fiscal years since I came to the Senate: 1955 1959 million million Mental Health ............$14.1 $52.4 Heart...
...We thought they would be interested in attending a hearing before Senator Lister Hill's subcommittee on National Cancer Institute appropriations, in the basement of the Capitol Building...
...I had recently passed the great Senate caucus room where a hearing was under way of the Senate Rackets Committee...
...Quietly, they talked of a possible break-through employing chemotherapy as a method of treating cancer, and of the fact that viruses might be the etiological agent for cancer in human beings...
...Senator from Oregon, has taken an active leadership in health and medical research legislation since he became a member of the Senate In January 1955...
...Despite our vaunted standard of living, the male residents of the United States have a shorter life expectancy than the males of no fewer than seven other countries— Holland, Great Britain, New Zealand, Israel, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark...
...for such a proposal as IMY...
...I remember a day in the Senate, some months ago, when some of the lack of this appreciation was vividly impressed upon me...
...Few people outside the inner citadel of medical science are such symbols of concern for health as this Southern liberal, who has served in Congress since 1923 and whose grandfather and father before him were eminent physicians...
...They rallied behind the nation's premier political figure in the field of public health, Senator Lister Hill of Alabama, to make available for research into cancer, heart disease, and blindness at least a fraction of what we invest in armaments and other weapons of destruction...
...Such a project could mobilize all the world's skills, knowledge, and facilities for an all-out onslaught against heart disease, against the grim series of malignant diseases known as cancer, against malaria, against the blinding glaucoma which plagues the Orient, and against all the other sinister maladies that kill and torment members of the human race...
...Luther L. Hill, was the first American surgeon to perform a successful suture of the human heart...
...He wrote that the effect of tender medical care on these forsaken people could be "Christ-like in power and simplicity . . ." The idea occurred to me again when I noticed that, during both 1956 and 1957, not more than one per cent of our foreign-aid funds were used for health measures...
...An International Medical Research and Health Year was proposed by Adlai E. Stevenson in an eloquent commencement address to the students of Michigan State University last June...
...The klieg lights of television flooded the place...
...Indeed, it is little short of miraculous that Congress has been able to achieve this goal during a period when the executive branch of government is headed by a President whose budget actually had discouraged such a program...
...This reveals why Senator Hill is my first choice to be American chairman of IMY...
...This ranged from outer space to caves and crevasses, from Antarctica to the steaming jungles of the Amazon and Congo...
...One of these could be a greater talent for separating the things of lasting value from those of only transitory importance...
...Nor would an IMY—meaning International Medical Year—be without immense potential benefits to America itself...
...And IMY, originating in the United States, might help to instill in Americans a renewed appreciation for the wonders of medical research...
...Furthermore, I believe the political climate is right in the United States RICHARD t. NEUBERGER, U.S...
Vol. 22 • October 1958 • No. 10
