Student of Life

Death came last week to big, vigorous Surgeon George Washington Crile, who did not waste a day in his 78 years. He worked hard even at play until a heart infection last November brought him to his own great Cleveland Clinic as a patient. His chief personal characteristic was energy, and his chief study from the time he was a medical student at Wooster University (now part of Cleveland's Western Reserve University) was the bewildering mystery of the nature of the energy that is called life.

Practical Surgery. Dr. Crile's biggest contributions to surgery began when as an intern he saw a young man die after his legs were crushed by a railroad train. The boy did not die of bleeding, which was very slight, but of shock--a depression of vitality brought about by fear, pain and injured nerves. Dr. Crile came to believe that unconsciousness at the time of operation was no guarantee against death-dealing shock, that injured nerves could send dangerous impulses even to an unconscious brain.

By 1912 Dr. Crile was practicing "shockless surgery" by a method he called anoci-association (meaning: not to injure consciousness). A Crile patient usually received a sedative injection (morphine and scopolamine) an hour before operation to eradicate fear. To prevent injured tissues from communicating with the brain, nerves leading from the operative field were blocked off by novocain anesthesia. As the operation progressed, more novocain at the site of operation preceded every move. To lessen discomfort after operation, Dr. Crile gave injections of quinine and urea hydrochloride. His interest in shock led him to experiment with adrenalin (a hormone which produces the symptoms of shock) and blood transfusions for relief of shock.

Dr. Crile's skill brought him such patients as E. H. Harriman and William Randolph Hearst, thousands of others from all over the U.S.--he personally removed about 25,000 goiters. (Goiter removal is most frequent operation at Minnesota's Mayo and Boston's Lakey Clinics.) He devised his own operations for cancer of the lip and prolapse of the uterus, and advocated an operation on the coeliac ganglion (nickel-size nerve center above the kidneys) to bring down high blood pressure.

Unpractical Research. But practical surgery did not satisfy the doctor. The spare hours which most busy surgeons somehow find he devoted to research, theorizing and the writing of over 20 books, including On the Blood Pressure in Surgery, The Fallacy of the German State Philosophy, Man, an Adaptive Mechanism, The Phenomena of Life. He studied the organs of man and of animals from snails to race horses in his search for the secret of living energy. Many of the animals he collected himself on hunting trips, from Hudson Bay (where he bagged a white whale) to Africa (where, when he was 72, he bagged a seven-ton elephant). Each animal was promptly dissected, its "energy-controlling organs"--heart, thyroid, brain, adrenals--measured and' examined on the spot.

From such researches Dr. Crile concluded that, except for man and the higher apes, the brain size of earth's animals is almost directly proportional to energy output. He worked out a "radio-electric" interpretation of life: plants, he believed, are "generated by radiant and electric energy" from the sun; animals get their radiant and electric energy from plants; in a living cell the acid nucleus is positively charged, the surrounding cytoplasm (cell substance) is negative and the cell membrane is a condenser; in the body as a whole, the brain is a positive pole, the red blood cells negative. Few scientists went along with Dr. Crile in his theories and many were downright irritated in 1930 when he made "something approximating life" (he was careful to say it was not life) from chemicals in a test tube.

"Biological Necessity." Dr. Crile did not mind the criticism. "Struggle," he said, "is a biological necessity, and even war is preferable to pusillanimous peace leading to degeneracy." He himself never let up. He continued to present his papers before the best scientific societies (e.g., Philadelphia's exclusive, ancient Philosophical Society), received a score of medals and honorary degrees. He was not even halted when in 1929 the Cleveland Clinic was gutted by a fire which cost 125 lives--patients, doctors, nurses, many of Dr. Crile's best friends among them--and when, about the same time, he lost in real estate most of the $2,000,000 fortune his surgery had built.

Less than two years ago, at 76, he came near death when a plane in which he was returning from Florida crashed in a swamp. He developed pneumonia after sitting all day waist-deep in muck, directing first-aid operations. When he recovered he took no rest cure but flew back to Cleveland to work on the Clinic's museum of stuffed animals and their preserved viscera.

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