Smyrna Times

State Doctors To Hold 173rd. Annual Session

Delaware doctors converge on Wilmington Saturday (October 6) for the Medical Society of Delaware's 173rd Annual Scientific Session. The meeting, to be held in the Delaware Academy of Medicine, will feature speakers from Harvard, Columbia and Cornell, as well as two of the country's leading teaching hospitals.

Medical books, instruments and drugs will also be displayed. Mayor John E. Babiarz of Wilmington and Dr. D.J. Preston, president of the New Castle County Medical Society, will open the meeting with addresses of welcome. Dr. Sylvester W. Rennie, retiring president of the State Medical Society, will give his presidential address.

The meeting will then be turned over to scientific work, except for a brief pre-luncheon meeting at which a president-elect for 1963 will be named.

Dr. C.A. Stevenson, director of orthopedic surgery at the Portsmouth Naval Hospital, will open with a discussion of mass casualty management in a community hospital. He will emphasize emergencies other than war, concentrating on the situation that arises every year in this country when a catastrophe injures many people at the same time. Dr. Stevenson will stress the priorities for helping the injured and the surgical team concept, and will illustrate special equipment.

Vitamins in medical practice will be considered by Dr. W.H. Sebrell, Jr., professor of nutrition at Columbia University. He will analyze the usefulness of vitamins in combating the special stresses illness places on the body, and will discuss the types and quantities of supplemental vitamins that are useful in various health situations.

Children's bones are softer than adults' and they tend toward a different type of fracture. Furthermore, the child's bone is still growing, and this affects the management of a break. Dr. Preston A. Wade, professor of surgery at Cornell University School of Medicine, New York, and chairman of the American College of Surgeons' committee on fractures, will discuss these and other special problems of children's fractures.

After lunch, Dr. Norman L. Cannon, president of the Delaware Academy of Medicine, will present awards on behalf of the Academy to James L. Parmentier and John M. Graham, winners, respectively, of the Senior and Junior divisions of the biological sciences exhibits at the 1962 Delaware Science Fair.

Dr. Harold A. Zintel, director of surgery at St. Luke's Hospital, New York, will then discuss postoperative problems particularly shock and the maintenance of a proper balance of body fluids. Dr. Edwin F. Cave, professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard Medical School, will explore the surgical treatment of fractures. He will consider when the operation is needed, what its complications are likely to be, and how they are best handled.

Finally, Dr. Wade, Dr. Cave and Dr. Zintel will join a group of local surgical specialists for a panel on traumatic injury. The panel will discuss and analyze the treatment of typical cases. Participants from Delaware will include Dr. James Beebe, Jr., of Lewes, Dr. Cannon, Dr. James T. Metzger and Dr. Frank T. O'Brien, both of Wilmington.

The session will end with a banquet at the Hotel duPont.

Features will be the presentation of the Society's annual Distinguished Service Award to a Delaware doctor, and the installation of Dr. Willard F. Preston of Wilmington as president for the coming year.