Palpable Darkness

One of the most delicate of all operations is that for mastoid. It is especially difficult and dangerous when the patient is very young. The slightest inaccuracy on the part of the surgeon will let his scalpel pierce the meninges and brain, but the parents of the 16-month-old child that lay on the operating table of the Brownsville and East New York Hospital one night last week had the fullest confidence in the operator, Dr. Raphael Schillinger. Rubber-gloved and white-suited, he bent tensely over the tiny head. High-powered lamps poured their white fire down. Two assistants working beside him, watched him make a deep incision in the porcelain curve of tissue and bone behind the baby ear, held their breath as he worked his bright instrument deeper, upward and sideways, toward the brain-- then stood frozen with horror as the palpable darkness of tragedy blinded them. Every light in the hospital had suddenly gone out.

The emergency was met. The supervising nurse rushed pocket flashlights to the operating room; by their feeble and uncertain light Dr. Schillinger finished his operation. The baby lived. But a question has been raised which the nurses, doctors, internes of the Brownsville and East New York Hospital began to ask each other: "Should not our hospital, and every hospital, have its own emergency lighting system?"*

*Most modernly equipped hospitals have them.