Mower Missiles

As spring moves north with the growing grass, the snarl of some 19 million powered lawnmowers is heard in the land.

All these mechanized grass cutters are far more dangerous than that vanishing antique--the man-powered machine. But injuries that occur when hands or feet come in contact with whirling blades, though frequently serious, are at least obvious.

Power mowers also bring a more insidious hazard. In about a third of the accidents they cause, report Drs. Eric M.

Chazen and John L. Chamberlain III in the New England Journal of Medicine, power mowers act exactly like missile launchers. And a dangerous wound may be devilishly hard to find. Rotary mowers have flat cutting blades that spin at 2,400 to 4,000 r.p.m. The swift blades can hurl a stone, a rusty nail or a broken-off piece of the mower itself at a speed of 300 ft. per second. A child in the next yard may not realize what has hit him.

As a result of a typical power-mower accident, a two-year-old girl seemed, on admission to Vanderbilt University Hospital, to have poliomyelitis. She was feverish and had a stiff neck; her left eye and right side were partly paralyzed. But the doctors were puzzled by a bruise and swelling on the top of her head. Eventually, her parents recalled that six days earlier, something had hit her on the head while she was standing near a power mower. X rays showed that a piece of metal, more than an inch long, had penetrated the skull and a big abscess had formed around it. Surgeons had to open the child's skull to remove the metal and drain the abscess. And it took a battery of antibiotics and serums to pull the little girl through a severe infection.

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