ALL ABOUT THE BODY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 653, 11 January 1952, Page 6

ALL ABOUT THE BODY

. OST of us are apt to take our bodies for granted. Only when they get out of order through illness or injury do we pay much attention to them; and then ignorance may lead to needless alarm or unfounded optimism. To give the ordinary listener an idea of how his body works and a glimpse of the vistas of knowledge being constantly opened up by medical science, the BBC broadcast last year a series of six programmes called The Human Body. So much interest was taken in them that within a few months of the broadcasts being made they were scheduled for a second run. These programmes, which are expected to beas they were in Britain-of interest also to doctors who may be too busy with daily practice to read every newly published paper, and to scientists working in other fields, will be heard weekly from the YC and YZ stations, starting at 3YC on Wednesday, January 16, at 9.33 p.m,, and at 1YC on Friday, January 18, at 8.0 p.m. Leading members of the staff of the University of Birmingham collaborated in preparing the talks which were edited by Professor S. Zuckerman, C.B., F.R.S., Professor of Anatomy at the University. Robin Whitworth is the producer and many listeners will remember that he and Professor Zuckerman were responsible for the BBC series The Animal World, broadcast in New Zealand during May, June and July last year. The first programme, written by Martin Chisholm in consultation with P. L. _

Krohn, Lecturer in Anatomy, will deal with the ways the body protects itself against stress and strain; excesses of heat and cold, fear and fatigue. It will describe the experiences of boxers and boat race crews, workers in steel mills, mountain climbers and airmen, soldiers ~~ ee

wounded on the battlefield, and men who have to hurry off to the office while still swallowing the last drop of coffee. It will also have something to say about the discovery of cortisone. In the second programme, which Mr. Chisholm wrote with the help of J. T. Eayrs (Department of Anatomy), listeners will hear some of the things that science has learned about the realm of the senses-how blind, deaf or dumb people can learn to manage without one or more of the faculties on which they normally rely, and still lead happy and useful lives. Once it was thought that there were only five senses (sight and hearing, taste, touch and smell), but the scientists have not only found new senses; they are developing the use of them by ‘radar and infrared photography. Blood will be the subject of the next programme, which will explain how it nourishes the body, what it consists of and how it guards against infection and integrates all the other tissues of the body. For this talk Martin Chisholm worked with Dr. P. L. Mollison (Blood Transfusion Research Unit). Boswell Taylor compiled the fourth programme in association with Dr. R. E. Billingham (Department of Zoology). This will examine the covering in which we spend our lives-the skin. It will show how the skin can adapt itself to a variety of circumstances, and will range in topic from fingerprints to wrinkles, gooseflesh to dandruff, and palmistry to plastic surgery. It is noticeable how diseases change as generation succeeds generation. The

scourge of 50 years ago may become @ comparatively mild ailment today; and as though to redress the balance, other illnesses seem to take on a new virulence. The fifth programme, which will deal with the "changing face of disease," will be of particular interest to parents. For his information here, Martin Chisholm consulted W. H. Wynn (Emeritus Professor of Medicine) and found that scarlet fever, for example, is now looked on as a far less dangerous illness than it. was 20 years ago. On the other hand, the opposite tends to be the case with measles. Inoculation has gone a long way towards eliminating diphtheria, and major changes have been brought about by the use of drugs such as the sulphonomides and penicillin. Against this we hear more of poliomyelitis today than 20 years ago. Tracer substances will be the subject of the final programme, and’ listeners will hear ‘how the radio-active substances’ which have become available since the end of the war can be used to investigate processes of the body and treat disorders. This. programme was also written by Martin Chisholm, in collaboration with A. C. Frazer (Professor of Pharmacology). Some of the peacetime and constructive applications to medical problems of the knowledge of nuclear physics which led to the making of the atom bomb will be discussed. The Human Body will require the uninterrupted attention of the listener and for that reason each programme hag been limited to half an hour.