MODERN ALCHEMY.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1236, 19 September 1911, Page 6

MODERN ALCHEMY.

— ♦ WONDERS OF THE RADIUM INSTITUTE. CURES IN LUXURY. On and after August 14 (writes the London "Daily News") the doors of the Radium Institute, which was founded by Lord Iveagh and King Edward VII, will be open to the public. Onco again England will lead the world, for the institute is more elaborately equipped for its special work and has a larger supply of the essential element, radium, than any other establishment either in Europe or America. No man of science would dare to prophesy what strange cures and stranger discoveries it may witness.. At any rate,.radium, tho infant revolutionist, is to bo given tho fullest possible opportunity ■ to upset theories and work miracles.

Seen from Riding House Street, which, skirts Queen's Hall, the institute might bo a restaurant or a fashionable dressmaker's. Inside, the restaurant impression persists; marble tiles and wainscoting, luxuriously carpeted stairs, and a noiseless, swift-running lift support it.

To right and left of the main corridor are the diagnosis rooms, pleasantly furnished littlo parlours, where the medical superintendent, Mr. Hayward Pinch, will ascertain whether or not those who como to the institute are likely to be benefited by radium treatment. IVo of the rooms are for- paying patients—one fitted with black blinds, so that absolute darkness can be secured at a moment's noticer-and two for patients who pay nothing. Throughout the institute the departments are separate, yel hardly distinguishable in the matter of furniture, and the treatment will, of course, be identical in both. Among many curious things in these rooms, perhaps the most remarkable is tho apparatus for making'use of the.scientific marvel known as Killian's bronchoscopy, by means of which a patient's interior anatomy, or the contents of his stomach, may be made visible. Cure Cubicles. If the patient is found to be suffering from a malady that may yield to the influence of radium, he will enter the silent lift, and a moment later bo in tho upper corridor, out of which twelve treatment cubicles . open. Each cubicle can, at a pinch, accommodate two or three patients, so that thirty or more persons might undergo treatment at tho same time. In these cubicles many sufferers from cancer will doubtless sit tor hours, ihoping against hope for a cure, or, at the least, relief from pain. Whether such cases can bo benefited by the mysterious radium emanations is still a matter for debate. On the other hand, no doubt remains as to the helping power of the rays where many kinds of tumours and painful or disfiguring skin diseases are concerned. According to the case, treatmont may la'st for from fifteen minutes to forty hours, administered either continuously or at a series of visits.

Another ascent by tho noiseless lift, and the chemico-physical laboratory—the "alchemists' don," as it has been nicknamed—is reached. Here, 'among tubes and taps and tiny trays of silica turned a ghostly purplo by the radium rays, gloved and goggled chemists are already wrestling with the "infant revolutionist." Besides doing the necessary work of turning all the radium chloride and radium bromide purchased into radium sulphate, and preparing tho screcns of lead, silver, and aluminium by means of which tho rays are filtered before coming into contact with the patient's flesh, these chemists aro observing that amazing phenomenon, the actual transmutation of metals, which seems to realise the dream of medieval alchemy. In a dark room close by the weird glow created in sympathetic substances by the alpha, beta, and gamma rays—a duil red when the substance is kunzit'e, a ghastly green when it is willemite, and so on— can bo studied with the help of radium at .£l6 a milligramme. Nest door the purplish glare of the electric arc betrays the presence of a photographic 6tudio. Disease Germs in Store. , The pathological laboratory is less startling but moro gruesome to the layman. Disease bacilli flourish in rows of glass tubes like miniature organ pipes, or exhibit the signs of their destruction after, say, 35 hours' exposure to tho lethal radium emanations. Other bacilli can be watched as they wriggle merrily beneath the lenses of an ,£SO microscope that magnifies theiu 1309 diameters.

Two of the very latest and most perfect machines for taking sections of diseased human tissue aro of special interest to the mechanically minded. One, bv means of a spray of carbonic acid gas, freezes, tho scrap of flesh, which is then sliced, and the section placed under a microscope. Within live minutes of removal from'the patient's body the surgeon is able to tell whether or not cancer is present in the tissue, and consequently whether an operation is necessary. Tho second machine will furnish slices for the microscopo down to one 25,000 th part of an inch in thickness, and could divide a blood corpuscle into eight parts. In the basement, near a strong-room, where 'radium to the value of many tens of thousands of pounds will be stored, is the institute's pair of scales isolated from all vibration on a massive stone table. They will register something less than a thousandth part of a milligramme, which means that they would weigh a man's signature or the tiniest of hairs from an infant's head. One of their uses will be to test tho loss of weight which radium sustains by reason of its radiancy.

Some points which the Executive Committee (of which Sir Frederick Treves is chairman) are anxious to emphasise are that no experiments of any kind upon animals will take place at tho institute, and that no person, can be treated except upon the recommendation of a registered medical practicioner. Treatmoat will be supplied gratis whenever necessary, but it will bo useless for any person to apply, unless furnished with a medical certificate. Tho list of prospective patients is already a long one.