Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/332

CARRYING ON IN THE "OLD RED BRICK" the Radiation Unit of the Institute collects data, from the atomic and nuclear tests conducted in this country, for the Atomic Energy Commission.

The materials received from Japan have been found of use in a score of special researches, including studies by General DeCoursey and statistical analyses by Francis X. Lynch, supervisor of the unit, and Mardelle L. Clark, Chief of the Statistics Branch of the Institute.12

Before the studies could be undertaken, it was necessary to correlate the specimens and case histories with the named individuals from whom the specimens had been taken and to whom the histories applied— a painstaking procedure made more complicated by language differences and especially by unfamiliarity with the sound and the spelling of Japanese names which had to be transliterated into some sort of American equivalent for filing purposes.

Studies of radiation effects were not the only medical problem plagued by differences in language and medical nomenclature. Difficulties in diagnosis, made more difficult by the growing confusion in the naming of neoplastic diseases, led to the publication by the Institute of its "Atlas of Tumor Pathology," as a contribution to the broadly based efforts of health organizations to combat cancer. This project had its genesis in discussions at the Fourth International Congress for Cancer Research, meeting in St. Louis, Mo., in 1947, out of which there grew the suggestion that "renewed attempts be made to simplify and standardize the nomenclature of neoplastic diseases and to devise means toward aiding graduate and undergraduate teaching of oncology" — the medical term for the body of knowledge pertaining to tumors.

This suggestion led to the calling of a conference of specialists held in Washington under the joint auspices of the National Research Council and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Army Institute of Pathology, at which it was recommended that a subcommittee on oncology be set up by the National Research Council's Committee on Pathology, as part of the Committee's overall program. In November 1947, the subcommittee was formed with Dr. Shields Warren of Boston, Mass., as chairman; and Doctors Balduin Lucke of Philadelphia, Pa., Arthur Purdy Stout and Fred W. Stewart of New York, N.Y., Milton Winternitz of New Haven, Conn., and Harold Stewart of Bethesda, Md.,