Medicine: the modest record, kept modest — a powder, a syndrome, and a negative

1947–1956 · THE MEDICAL RECORD AS IT VERIFIES

The powder: Fort Wayne's medical inventiveness is real and small, and this entry refuses to inflate it. In 1947 Roy Schomburg, a longtime Fort Wayne pharmacist, with his father Carl, patented Schomburg Stomach Powder — a bismuth subgallate preparation, in pharmacist John Rogers's account of Indiana's medical inventions "concocted and finally patented" here, a member of the antacid family the public now knows through Pepto-Bismol. In 1956 S. M. Rabson, a Fort Wayne pathologist, and E. N. Mendenhall, a Fort Wayne general practitioner, described three siblings with a distinctive disorder of precocious growth and severe insulin resistance; the condition entered the medical literature under their names as the Rabson–Mendenhall syndrome, and the 2022 review of severe insulin resistance still introduces it by its two Fort Wayne authors and their city. And the entry closes with the negative the evidence requires: no Fort Wayne claim to insulin itself, or to any insulin first, was located anywhere in the record searched. Insulin's documented history is Toronto's (1921–22) for the discovery and Indianapolis's (Lilly) for its manufacture; Fort Wayne's diabetes history is a history of care, not of that breakthrough, and any telling that borrows one is borrowing.

Sources:

1. John Rogers, "Indiana's Rich Traditions in Medical Inventions," Quest Club paper (2002), via Haines — Roy and Carl Schomburg's 1947 stomach powder patent, its composition and family.
2. "Severe Insulin Resistance Syndromes," Hormone Research in Paediatrics (2022) — Rabson the pathologist and Mendenhall the practitioner, "both in Fort Wayne, IN," and the three siblings of the 1956 description.
3. The insulin record as searched — Toronto 1921–22 and Lilly's Indianapolis manufacture; no Fort Wayne claim located (stated as a negative of the search).