Safe on Ice

Freezing the body kills a man. But freezing a gangrenous leg may save a man's life. When this discovery was first announced five years ago--by Drs. Lyman W. Grossman and Frederick M. Allen of New York City--many a medico was shocked. But the two doctors persisted in their chilling experiments. Last week they reported progress in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Certain organisms can stand intense cold; some survive temperatures of --272DEG Centigrade. Cold is a preservative and an anesthetic; it slows metabolism, kills pain, halts the spread of infection. Grossman & Allen found that when they packed a gangrenous leg in ice before amputation, reducing its skin temperature from the normal 90DEG to 40DEG, they needed no other anesthetic; the danger of death from shock was greatly reduced and the leg healed better and quicker. Sometimes the refrigeration technique, by allowing time for drugs and other treatments to take effect, even saved the leg from amputation.

The two doctors and their followers progressed to using icebag anesthesia on blood clots, burns, various injuries. The results they got were "phenomenal." In one case, a patient's hand, which had been crushed to a pulp and would ordinarily have been amputated, was miraculously restored. In another case, a patient's finger was almost cut off. Packed in ice until the doctor got there, the finger was successfully sewed back on.

Grossman & Allen suggest that refrigeration might even make it possible to restore an amputated arm or leg: "If a limb is fairly cleanly amputated, for example in a sawmill accident, there is a challenge to any nearby physician to pack such a part in ice and send it along with the patient to a hospital. . . ."

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