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Show Prevailing Opinions Comment of the American Press ' Ratio of Laughter and Tears A University of Illinois professor profes-sor has proved statistically that this is no vale of tears. He finds the students laughing 400 times for every cry and believes the 400-to-l ratio is at least maintained main-tained outside the campus. And yet it probably is true that if all the artificial restraints upon expression could be removed, laughter would still be hundred hun-dred or two hundred times mors frequent than th opposite. Th trouble with the human race Is that it accepts comparative comfort com-fort and happiness as th normal stat of things, so th comfortable comforta-ble hours slip by unnoticed. When interruption comes it I so unusual un-usual a to b remembered. On frequently sees suffering people who are happy becaus they think back upon th unusual upon hours of happiness, and healthy people who go around blackly, thinking of hours of suffering. If men and women had th capacity ca-pacity for knowing when they are lucky, this wouldn't be a bad world at all The Portland Ore-gonin. Medicine and the News Trustees of the American Medical Medi-cal association got together with science reporters and columnists in Chicago and discussed the manifold difficulties which lie in the way of th intelligent handling han-dling of medical news. This is an old problem, and sometimes it scesns beyond solution. And yet the situation is infinitely better bet-ter than it wa only a decade ago. Members of the medical profession profes-sion generally are less reluctant to talk to qualified reporters on matters of public interest, meaning mean-ing news; for It own part, th press is mor respectful toward medical ethic and print less and less sensational, misleading and even dangerous claims. But th world is notoriously imperfect. A half doaen year ago th New York academy of medicine, in n attempt to form a sort of clearing hous for medical news, established estab-lished a bureau of medical information in-formation and placed Dr. lag Caldston at its head. This bureau bu-reau ha served not as a publicity fountain, but mor as a friendly guid to newspapers which find themselves confronted by medical medi-cal news which appears to b of a questionable or too recondite nature. na-ture. On the whole, tha result have been well worth th experiment; experi-ment; something ef th same sort ' might be tried in other large ' cities. Neither th press nor medicine, w assume, would want to mislead mis-lead anyon deliberately. Two things appear to be needed a lessening of the delay or time lag between a discovery in the laboratory lab-oratory and its actual clinical application ap-plication to patients: the mora ready availability of first hand sources of medical news to properly prop-erly qualified writers. Maybe this Is asking too much. We can at least be grateful that we don't read of sure "cancer cures" any mor. and that we have learned to be skeptical of all claims of "absolutely -painless dentistry." New York Herald-Tribune. He"S.;d 'So. On great difficulty in th way of Republican comeback. It occurs oc-curs to us. is th fart that there are milliona of people who eould read th following sentence from th New York Times' report of a speech by G. O. P. Chairman John -Hamilton without realising that tha fourth word was a typographical typo-graphical error: "A liberal Republicanism socks th interest of the common man no less sincerely and far mor practically prac-tically than does Mr. Roosevelt" Rocky Mountain News. |