The Farmer & the Drug

Husky young T. C. Gaines, an Arizona farmer, had promised to lend his tractor to a neighbor. One day last May, as good as his word, he delivered the tractor and drove his truck over to the neighbor's farm to explain its workings. As he filled the tractor's tank with gas, a hired hand lit a cigarette. A split second later, panic-stricken Gaines was streaking across the field, his gasoline-soaked clothes a flaming torch. His friends managed to halt his flight, put out the flames and got him to the truck. No one else knew how, so Gaines himself had to drive 40 miles to the nearest hospital, a 42-bed affair maintained by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Once there, he collapsed. Receiving doctors, spotting the ugly third-degree burns which covered a full three-quarters of his body, had little hope that he would ever rise again. After giving him the standard treatment, the Indian Affairs doctors shipped him off by plane to Saint Monica Hospital in Phoenix. There he was put under the care of Dr. James Whitelaw.

Skinless but Normal. With little to lose in Gaines's case, Dr. Whitelaw decided the time had come to play a hunch. He ordered all other medication stopped. Then he began injecting his patient at six-hour intervals with 20-milligram shots of ACTH, the new synthetic hormone (TIME, April 10). Within five days the patient's most dangerous symptoms had vanished. He was resting comfortably, "a normal man," in the words of one doctor, "only without much skin."

Last week, well on the road to complete recovery, Gaines appeared in person at Chicago before doctors from all over the country, as Exhibit A in a two-day conference on ACTH sponsored by Armour & Co., first commercial producers of the hormone. His case offered the most dramatic evidence to date of the powers of the new drug. Though cautious in prediction as always, doctors studying Gaines's recovery --together with that of several badly burned children--seemed inclined to agree that ACTH (which has been hopefully tried out on virtually every ailment from tuberculosis to snakebite) might prove a potent cure for burns.

Spider & Snake. By stimulating the adrenal glands during a crisis, the hormone injections serve to forestall most of the early complications (shock, pain, fever, infection, impairment of kidney function, loss of body fluids) which make burns most dangerous. As the cure progresses, the increased glandular activity helps still further by sustaining appetite and promoting new skin growth. Since burns heal in a relatively short time, the burn victim need not worry about the bad side effects (excessive hair growth, face swelling, skin streaking, etc.) that often follow long-sustained dosages of the drug.

Among the 100 papers read at Chicago last week giving details of experiments in ACTH during the past year, there were other evidences of the drug's usefulness in short-term applications. In Savannah ACTH had saved one woman from the bite of a black widow spider and another from the bite of a copperhead snake. Early administration of ACTH in some cases of rheumatic fever had seemed to avert permanent damage to the heart. By & large, however, the Chicago papers proved only that doctors still have much to learn about the new drug. Where long-term administration of ACTH is necessary, as in cases of arthritis, the dangers inherent in the new drug still seem to threaten any lasting benefits. Doctors could still deplore the first buoyant reports which indicated that ACTH might be a specific remedy for arthritis.

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