THE MEDICAL CONGRESS.

Wairarapa Age, 9 February 1927, Page 4

THE MEDICAL CONGRESS.

IMPORTANT DISCUSSIONS. MANY VALUABLE PAPERS READ. DUNEDIN, February 8. The Medical Congress was continued to-day, when several educative and valuable papers were read. Pathology and bacteriology, the work carried out at the Walter and Eliza Hill Institute for Research at Melbourne, was dealt with by Dr. C. H. Kell eway. Dr. L. B. Bull and Professor Burton Cleland, both of Adelaide University, described research work concerned with the various anaemias, particularly pernicious anaemia. Dr. G. M. Heydon, bacteriologist of the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine in Townsville, although not present, contributed two papers, one on the hookworm disease and the other on the discovery by Dr. Backhouse and himself of a rare fluke, named Paragonimus. This fluke was productive of illness in the human being, the dog and the cat. On Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Dr. Henry Jellett, of Christchurch (a previous master of Rotunda Hospital, the chief obstetrical hospital in Dublin) read a paper warning his colleagues against the abuse of the operation of the Caesarean section as a means of delivering a woman of her baby. He dealt in detail with all the alleged indications leading to this operation, and showed how each one of these conditions could be met by other means. Dr. A. M. Wilson, Melbourne, also dealt with the same subject. He emphasised the risk attending the operation and pointed out that the risk was greatly increased when complications were present. Professor J. C. Windeyer, of Sydney, agreed with Dr. Jellett that the Caesarean section had been grossly overdone everywhere, and particularly in America. Dr. F. R. Riley, of Dunedin, agreed in the main with the previous speak ers, but recounted the conditions under which he had thought it wise to do the operation. Several other speakers testified to the fact that if ante-natal supervision were carried out consistently, the necessity for submitting women to so risky an operation would disappear. Tuberculosis in children occasioned a long discussion and the subject of infantile paralysis was thoroughly thrashed out. Surgeon Commander Dudley gave an interesting account of the means of forecasting outbreaks of diphtheria. He claimed that the spread of infection depended on the relative number of immune persons and the number of su- - ceptible-s, and he showed how, by a simple calculation, he could determine what he called the herd immunitv index.—(P.A.)