Heart Throbs

A slim young doctor strides through the wards of Montefiore Hospital, New York. He stops at a bed, reads a chart, scrutinizes a face, listens to a heart. He prescribes and strides on, his necktie, but not his thoughts, dangling loosely. He is Dr. Morris M. Weiss. Twenty-six-year-old Dr. Weiss already has two discoveries on heart disease to his credit. One discovery was that auricular fibrillation (a form of heart disease in which the heart fibres rustle like breeze-tossed leaves) was common among children. Dr. Weiss made the discovery by shrewdly interpreting the ominous irregularity of heartbeats in children sick at Montefiore Hospital. But he refused to believe his own ears, for medical literature had reported only nine such cases in all history. So he consulted with Dr. Sidney Pincus Schwartz of Manhattan, a visiting physician. Together they searched hospital records; examined every child they could find with heart disease; found that out of 63 cases, 13 suffered from fibrillation. This they reported to the New York Academy of Medicine a fortnight ago. Last week Dr. Weiss continued his efforts to find means of preventing the rustling. The disease so far is uncontrollable and almost always fatal. Last week, also, he was preparing a report on another discovery--that when a case of pernicious anemia improves, the sufferer's heart spontaneously returns to normal size. Heretofore doctors had known that anemic hearts grow large (apparently to drive the thinned blood more copiously through the body), but had never observed the lessening in size. Here again Dr. Weiss refused to believe his senses, and consulted with Dr. Bernard Sutro Oppenheimer of Manhattan, chief of Montefiore Hospital's medical service. Dr. Oppenheimer also was surprised, but confirmed the discovery.