Rattle in the Throat

In a dozen years of riding rescue trucks, Eugene W. Fields, battalion chief in Omaha's fire department, tried to guard against every emergency. His trucks became hospitals on wheels with baby-delivery kits, oxygen masks, resuscitators, inhalators, iron lungs, ether masks, surgical gowns and sterile sheets. But Fields, a onetime Navy fire-fighting instructor, still fretted over occasional cases in which he had seen people choke to death while his crews probed blindly for something in the throat.

Then Fields read a magazine article about the laryngoscope, a device like a shoehorn with a built-in light for looking down people's windpipes. This was for him. Lest he be accused of "practicing medicine" without a license, Fields got advance approval from the Omaha-Douglas County Medical Society. He and his crews took a hospital course in use of the laryngoscope, and Fields talked an insurance company into donating two of the $65 gadgets.

Squad Captain Charles F. Walther of the South Omaha truck waited three years for a chance to prove his skill. He got it last week when a young (22) father, Ralph Nielsen, called the fire department for help: his baby was choking to death. In five minutes, Walther and his squad dashed up to the Nielsens' house, found baby Thomas, aged five months, blue in the face. His pulse and breathing had stopped. There was not a minute to lose.

Walther fixed an inhalator tube to the baby's nose, slipped the laryngoscope down behind the tongue root, lifted the "clapper valve" (epiglottis) and looked in. Clearly visible was a one-inch celluloid ball (from a rattle), filling the windpipe. Alligator forceps thrust down the channel of the surgical shoehorn brought the ball out in 30 seconds, and Baby Thomas gasped. Soon he was breathing regularly again.

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