Printed in U.S.A. Snippets from the Past Comstock Snippets from the Past: 70 Years Ago in the Journal

to be long (18 pages in length on average). The great major-ity, 53, dealt with parasites ranging in size from tapeworms to viruses. Among the 60 first authors for whom full names were given, 13 were recognizably female. In the January issue for 1930 were two papers by Edgar Sydenstricker and Rollo H. Britten (1, 2) on the frequency of abnormalities among 100,924 White male life insurance policy holders who had accepted a physical examination provided by the Life Extension Institute. Sydenstricker, trained as a political economist, had been selected by the US Public Health Service to be its first public health statistician in 1915 (3). An early assignment was to work with Joseph Goldberger in his study of pellagra in seven South Carolina mill villages. Here Sydenstricker’s training as an economist led him to associate pellagra with economic conditions an