The 1930s Medicine and Health: Headline Makers

Alexis Carrel (1873–1944) Alexis Carrel immigrated to the United States from France in 1904. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1912 for his work on the transplantation of blood vessels. His techniques marked the beginnings of heart surgery and organ transplants. In 1935, along with aviator Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974), Carrel built the first mechanical heart. Carrel's political views made him unpopular with his employers at the Rockefeller Center. He returned to France at the beginning of World War II, where he worked for the French Ministry of Public Health.

Morris Fischbein (1889–1976) Morris Fischbein was one of the strongest opponents of regulation of the medical profession. Through the American Medical Association (AMA), Fischbein fought to stop doctors' cooperatives and corporations taking over healthcare. He disliked the fact that they paid doctors fixed salaries and used insurance schemes to pay for them. Fischbein thought that such "socialized medicine," as he called it, would turn doctors into mere laborers. As one of the most influential leaders of the AMA, Fischbein had many supporters. But by the end of the 1930s medical insurance was a popular and sensible choice for most patients.

Karen Horney (1885–1952) In 1932, Karen Horney became the assistant director at the newly opened Psychoanalytic Institute in Chicago. She argued against the ideas of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Where Freud thought that personality disturbance was caused by denying human instinct, Horney blamed it on the patients' upbringing. Horney's criticism of Freud left her alienated in the psychoanalytic community. She went on to found the American Institute of Psychoanalysis and had a major influence on the feminist movement of the 1960s.

Karl Landsteiner (1868–1943) Karl Landsteiner became an American citizen in 1929 and won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1930. His discovery of blood types, which are now categorized as A, B, AB, and O, made transfusions possible. Landsteiner was also interested in polio. He was the first to infect monkeys with the disease, giving other scientists a way of studying polio in the laboratory. In 1939, Landsteiner and his colleagues discovered a further blood subdivision. Each group could be Rh positive or negative. Landsteiner's work on blood and the immune system saved many lives.

Thomas Parran (1892–1968) Thomas Parran became surgeon general in 1936 and began his famous campaign against syphilis and sexually transmitted disease. The campaign began with an article in the Survey Graphic and Reader's Digest magazines called "Stamp Out Syphilis." Parran succeeded in redefining syphilis in the public mind as a curable illness, but he never was able to convince Americans that syphilis was a medical problem rather than a moral one. Despite one of the most famous public health campaigns in American history, syphilis was still a major killer at the end of the 1930s.

Francis Everett Townsend (1867–1960) Francis Everett Townsend became a champion of the elderly when he was himself an old man. Angry at the way old people were ignored and abandoned, he lobbied in 1933 that all retirees should receive sixty dollars a week from the time they turned sixty years old. Partly because of Townsend's public outcry, New Dealers in government made a small pension, an amount much smaller than Townsend proposed, a part of the Social Security Act of 1935.