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useful drugs, which carry people over cyclical states of depression. And I know three men of my acquaintance whose lives are made possible by these drugs; before, they might have had to be hospitalized.
Then another great triumph has taken place. One time in my life, in the late '40s and early '50s, I knew three people who had severe hypertension: one of them was Mrs. Schwartz, Arthur Schwartz's wife, a young and beautiful woman, and she had what was called severe and malignant hypertension. Oscar Ewing's wife--he was the head of the Federal Security Agency then, which later became the HEW--had severe hypertension, and the only thing you could do then was to go on a rice diet, which could lower blood pressure but which was so difficult to keep that you couldn't have any natural social life with other people. You had to eat entirely different from what they did, and this was very difficult and also was not agreed upon by many doctors, although it was completely proved by Kempner, of Duke University. But, fortunately, Serpasil and a number of early drugs were found, in the early '50s, to control high blood pressure, and the deaths from high blood pressure have declined at least between 32 and 36 percent since '52.
One of the great triumphs of the late '40s, which was an outgrowth of the research efforts of the war, was the discovery and the making of cortisone, and the isolation and use of ACTH. ACTH is a hormone in the pituitary. ACTH was found by a man called Evans and C. H. Lee at the University of California at
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