Pools of Healing

From the 18-story tower building of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson went home last week, remarkably recovered after a severe heart attack. Only the week before, the President of the U.S. had driven up to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, on Washington's outskirts, to have his eyes tested for new bifocals. (It turned out that he did not need any.) Almost any time a Washington VIP needs medical attention, one of the two big military hospitals is likely to be picked for his care. By Act of Congress, they may admit and treat civilians designated by the Secretaries of Army and Navy. By chance, most Senators seem to go to Bethesda,* most Representatives to Walter Reed--no one knows why. Civilians pay $17 a day for bed and tiptop care (a bargain, but not exactly a giveaway).

Though the VIPs get the headlines, the hospitals really exist for the benefit of their workaday patients: servicemen, who pay nothing, and their dependents, who pay $1.75 a day. Between them, the hospitals care for 32,000 bed patients a year--some flown in from ships of the Navy, Army posts and Air Force bases scattered around the world. Each general hospital is the hub of a great medical center, designed for teaching and research as well as patient-care. Walter Reed and Bethesda are constantly and quietly pioneering along many medical lines.

Squishy Trails. With its headquarters on 113 acres of Civil War battleground at" the District-Maryland line, Walter Reed has mushroomed since it opened in 1909 as a memorial to the famed conqueror of yellow fever. For all its latter-day interest in such matters as freeze-anesthesia and radiation sickness, the Army must still, like Reed, plod squishy jungle trails to track down diseases that beset its men in the tropics. Among Walter Reed's works-in-progress:

P: The Medical Service Graduate School has recently had a team in Madagascar studying plague, while another worked on scrub typhus in North Borneo. Now the big push on scrub typhus is in Japan (where it becomes tsutsugamushi disease): medics from Walter Reed are at Zama studying the chiggers that transmit the disease, while Japanese artists draw them.

P: The Central Virus Laboratory, run by famed Virologist Joseph Smadel, is concerned with the multitude of diseases caused by the smallest of microbes, which can knock troops out in no time (best example: the 1918-19 influenza pandemic). The lab has the Government's only polio diagnostic center. Says Dr. Smadel: "Our work ranges all the way from the fundamental and theoretical to the most practical. We can both develop theories and apply them. Aside from the Rockefeller Foundation, nobody else does research of this scope."

P: Walter Reed's Prosthetics Research Laboratory (started from scratch in 1945) is one of the world's most famed designers of artificial limbs. From pioneering in cineplasty (placing hooks in stump muscles to work limbs, so that artificial arms can now be lifted over the head), it has gone on to plastic materials that look like human skin. The "gloves" on its artificial hands now bear fingerprints which must be registered with the FBI. Latest gimmick: putting a human-type pigment in the plastic, so that the hands, instead of turning green, retain their color even under fluorescent light.

P: Once an Army responsibility but now elevated to supraservice status is the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, which serves the Veterans Administration, Public Health Service and Atomic Energy Commission as well. Behind its massive new walls (proof against radioactive contamination) are 656,000 bottled specimens of human tissue bearing the imprint of one or another of a thousand diseases, not to mention 6,332,508 slides containing tissue slices or body fluids for the diagnostic microscope. Among the institute's odd relics: a lock of Lincoln's hair and a sliver of bone from his skull; the leg lost by General Dan Sickles at the end of the battle at Gettysburg; parts of the brains of Mussolini and Nazi Boss Robert Ley.

Mice Under Stress. The Navy has one problem which the Army is glad to pass: the sardine-packing of 3,000 or more men into the hull of a single ship for months on end. So the Naval Medical Research Institute at Bethesda is crowding mice into little boxes and checking the working of their adrenal glands (an index to stress). Purpose: to learn how and why their "vitality and viability" go down in a crowd. Other Bethesda specialties:

P: The tissue bank, only one of its kind in the country. Designed and supervised by Dr. (Lieut. Commander) George W. Hyatt, it has already supplied needed parts of human anatomy, whether soft tissue or bone, for more than 700 patients. If a Bethesda surgeon wants a piece of bone, skin, artery, fascia (muscle sheathing) or dura (brain covering), he can find it in bottles neatly stacked on the first floor. For a long time, the great problem was to keep the tissues fresh. Ordinary refrigeration and thawing made them useless. The Navy got around this by ultra-rapid freeze-drying; now it vacuum-packs them so that they can be shipped and kept anywhere at room temperature. Dr. Hyatt is testing tissues from stillborn infants, which seem superior to any adult parts.

P: In a related experiment, Dr. Harold Thayer Meryman has frozen his own blood. First he took the precaution of drawing some of it from his body. Then he sprayed it with liquid nitrogen. This froze it. Dr. Meryman promptly thawed it, tagged it with radioactive chromium, then had it transfused back into his body. Object: to see whether the frozen blood would deteriorate faster than normal. A radiation counter, timing the clicks that Dr. Meryman set off, showed no difference in the rate of blood-cell destruction. Whole blood, now difficult to keep longer than three weeks, could be banked indefinitely after such freezing.

P: One of Bethesda's most engaging gadgets is a walkie-talkie electrocardiograph about the size of a hearing aid. Developed by Captain Norman Barr, it is strapped to a patient, who goes for a walk or plays tennis while his doctor sits back in the control room, hears the patient's heart sounds on an amplifier, watches the electrical pattern on an oscilloscope and gets a tracing of this in ink. Dr. (ex-pilot) Barr has two models: one with a range of a mile, one with a range of 80 to 100 miles that he uses to study aviators' hearts. He hopes to adapt this to catch the pit-a-pat of the first stout heart to ride a satellite.

* Legend has it that Franklin Roosevelt was out for a drive, when he asked the name of the place. "Bethesda?" he repeated. "That was 'the pool of healing.' What a place for a hospital!" F.D.R. had seen the tower capping Nebraska's capitol in Lincoln and had vowed: "Some day I'm going to build a Government building like that." Over the vigorous protests of his esthete uncle, Planning Commissioner Frederic Delano, he did. The highly impractical tower was built into the Navy's hospital at Bethesda in 1939.

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