Big Heart

Through the rough seas running off Clark's Point, Alaska, a small skiff put out. It carried a heart specialist and his assistants, but they were not on an errand of mercy. Curiosity--the kind of curiosity that kills cats for science--led them on. They were looking for a whale; they wanted to feel its pulse.

They found what they were looking for in the shallows of Nushagak Bay--a small (one-ton) beluga whale, come in to feed on salmon. It was not the first whale which had shied away from their "stethoscope": in earlier efforts the hunters had been unsuccessful. This time a husky cannery worker got a good grip on the patient : he drove home a pair of brass-headed harpoons wired to a portable electrocardiograph.

The whale was wildly uncooperative. It thrashed about the bay for an hour while the doctor clung to the gunwale. Amidships, a cardiograph expert crouched over his instrument and worked desperately with the controls. Somehow he managed to get a two-minute record of the plunging whale's heartbeats. The spray-drenched scientists went happily away, clutching the first such record in medical history.

The strange experiment started in 1917, in Boston, when Dr. Paul Dudley White bought a preserved whale heart from an old sea captain. Like other heart specialists, Dr. White had learned to doubt some of his own diagnoses. Symptoms of disease in smaller human hearts, he suspected, might well be signs of health in larger, slow-beating organs. To test his theories, Dr. White began to study the hearts of mammals larger than man. As medical examiner for Boston's Franklin Park Zoo, he dissected the heart of a dead elephant. Later, he took electrocardiograms of docile circus elephants. But Dr. White was not satisfied. He wanted to measure the heartbeat of a whale, the largest mammal of all.

Early this month, with the help of a Seattle heart specialist, Dr. Robert L. King, the adventurous physician got his electrocardiogram. Back again in Boston last week, 66-year-old Dr. White explained that the Alaskan expedition was only a beginning. Now that the equipment has been tested, he wants to try it on even larger whales.

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