A peculiar American disease has been isolated by medical scientists. The disease was first described in 1960 by Dr. J. V. Brown in the Western Journal of Surgery. An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association then drew wide medical attention to it. Commercial houses are now marketing products designed to cope with it. Statistics on incidence and morbidity are scanty, and the name of the disease is hazy. Some doctors call it “the fast draw syndrome”; others, “the Dodge City syndrome.” But whatever the name, it is with us. It is most prevalent, of course, among the numerous special gun clubs that have sprouted across the land in recent years. Members, taking a leaf out of days of yore and some scripts of today, draw guns from their holsters, quick as lightning, and fire away. Unlike their legendary heroes, they don’t shoot at one another but aim at balloons. Sometimes, though, they miss the balloon and hit themselves in the right foot...

A noise you hardly notice may enter your mind sometimes and, in a strange transformed way, become part of your thoughts. An experiment exploring this phenomenon was completed for the U.S. Public Health Service recently by Dr. Fred Pine, a New York University psychologist His results could shed some light on subliminal advertising, the technique in which a slogan is flashed on a screen so quickly you do not realize you see it. When this technique first received public notice, it was assumed that if, for example, the slogan "See Your Dentist Twice a Year" were flashed, the unsuspecting audience would tend to do just that. But Dr. Pine's experiment indicates it is not that simple. The slogan or noise seems to enter your mind. But it does not come out in conscious thoughts just the way it entered. In fact, images may pop up so different from the slogan or noise that only a psychologist could tell they were related. This would not do an advertiser much good. In the case of the dentist slogan, flashing it would probably not send anyone off to have his teeth examined. But it might cause some one in the audience to dream later that his is a lion tamer staring at the gaping jaws of his animal...

“Ants, mommy, ants” whimpered three-year-old Sonny as he scampered from the front lawn into his home. Sonny's face was twisted into a strange white. His frantic mother searched his little body. On his left foot swelled three ant bites. Twenty-nine hours later, Sonny was dead. The boy had become the rare victim of an allergic reaction to the vicious bite and sting of an imported fire ant. There is a treatment for the reaction. But few doctors even know the Imported fire ant exists. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recognizes the ant as an economic pest, hurting crops, land and birds. Now two Tulane University scientists have recognized it as a medical pest irritating many people sometimes killing. Dr Rodney C. Jung, a specialist In tropical medicine and Dr. Vincent J. Derbes, an allergist, do not believe the imported fire ant makes a huge or unusual medical problem. But until doctors understand the problem they may give wrong, useless treatment...

Joel LeBlanc, a 34-year-old quiet, gray-haired intellectual, stared through his glasses at a doctor lighting a cigarette. “Why is he doing that?" Joel wondered. Suddenly he thought he knew. “He hates me. That’s why. He hates me.” Joel saw another doctor smile. “Why is he smiling? Because he hates me too. They all hate me. They want to hurt me.” Joel wanted to hurt them first. He saw a stool “I'll bash that smiler's head in,” Joel decided. He rushed to the stool. Then he stopped short. Have you guessed what was wrong with Joel? He was showing symptoms of schizophrenia — a dread mental disease. If Joel was a real schizophrenic, he probably would be taken to a mental hospital like 350,000 other victims in this country. His chances for full recovery would be slight. But Joel’s symptoms disappeared in less than two hours. He was not a schizophrenic. He was a subject in a dramatic experiment that may point to a cure of the illness that accounts for half of our mental patients and one-quarter of all those who lie in hospital beds...

Mary Smith, a new student nurse, dreamed of the day she would minister tenderly among clean, white beds. In her excited young mind, she could see herself bending over a coughing little boy, her gentle hand pushing back the dampened hair from his forehead. Three years later, in the crisp uniform of a registered nurse, she entered a big city hospital. Now she had her clean white beds and the coughing boy. But when the boy coughed, it was an aide who bent over him. Mary had to scribble on charts, mix medications, prepare hypodermic needles, supervise student nurses. She had no time for nursing in the old sense. What's more, a group of Tulane University researchers have concluded, that's the way Mary wants things to be, even though she may neither realize nor admit this fact...

[Stanley Meisler's first published article] It took 22 years, but I finally got up enough nerve to let a pretty nurse, Mary Jane Bishop of Cincinnati, draw one whole pint of dark RED blood from a bulging BLUE vein in my pale WHITE arm. Officials of the Red Cross and the American Legion trapped me yesterday during the first day of the bloodmobile's current visit to Middletown. I was snooping around the Legion Home on a routine check of Red Cross business when Mrs. Charles Fay, scheduling chairman, suggested a tour of the bloodmobile operation...