The Chief Said: "Miracle"

The ex-marine had a gangrenous right foot that was black, mummified and so painful that he had to be drugged with morphine every three hours. Dr. Zolton Tillson Wirtschafter, of Wadsworth General Hospital for veterans in Los Angeles, decided to try something new. With most of the tense hospital staff standing by, he gave the suffering patient a couple of injections and settled down to wait.

Six hours later, the doctor rushed excitedly across the hospital grounds, burst into the medical chief's house and cried: "He's sleeping! He's sleeping! The pain has stopped!"

"A miracle," said the MC.

Opened Door. In 48 hours, the black gangrenous foot had begun to turn pink. Soon the patient could wriggle his toes. As Wirtschafter tried his new treatment on other patients, news of his discovery spread quickly through other Los Angeles hospitals. When Dr. Harry Goldblatt, world-famed high blood pressure expert, came to look, he said: "This is one of the two most exciting moments of my life."

Last week the Journal of the American Medical Association hurried to press a cautious, "preliminary" report by Dr. Wirtschafter and the treatment's co-discoverer, Dr. Rudolph Widmann. The detail that had roused the medical profession was that the treatment seemed to be something more than a possible cure for gangrene. It also opened the door to a brand-new attack on the whole range of such blood-vessel disorders as coronary thrombosis, angina pectoris, Buerger's disease, high blood pressure.

Gangrene results from blood clots blocking circulation. Dr. Wirtschafter, taking his cue from a colleague's experiment, had first tried attacking gangrene with intravenous injections of ether. It seemed to work in some cases. Why? Probably because ether makes the blood vessels sensitive to histamine, a body chemical which improves blood first by dilating the blood vessels.

Right Combination. If the body could be stimulated to produce more histamine, Wirtschafter reasoned, many ailments due to constriction or blocking of blood vessels might be easily cured. In the test tube, histamine can be made by combining two well-known substances--vitamin C (ascorbic acid) and an amino acid called histidine. Would it work in the body? First on guinea pigs and then on his patients, Wirtschafter tried intravenous injections of vitamin C, followed by intramuscular injection of a histidine solution. Sure enough, it worked: blood tests showed an increase in histamine.

That was the big discovery. Injections of the two substances every few hours in patients with gangrene not only stopped pain. By improving circulation, the shots also produced a surprising regeneration of the dying tissues. Every one of eleven patients suffering from various "peripheral vascular diseases" (gangrene, Buerger's, etc.), has responded to the treatment.

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