Medicine: Deep-Frozen Woman

When the policeman found Mrs. Dorothy Mae (“Johnny”) Stevens, 23, lying in a Chicago alley at 7:45 a.m., the temperature was eleven below, and Johnny was apparently dead. Her body seemed as hard as a rock. Said the cop: “I could have sworn she was dead except all of a sudden she groaned.”

An ambulance took her to Michael Reese Hospital, where an intern gave her a shot of coramine and caffeine. Then Staff Surgeon Harold Laufman and other doctors went to work on her.

Stiff Eyeballs. Johnny’s arms and legs were frozen solid. Her abdomen was stiff, her jaw locked tight. “Even her eyeballs,” says Dr. Laufman, “were crystal hard. They were like two glass beads.” Her temperature could not be taken at once, because regular clinical thermometers do not go low enough. After an hour and a half, a laboratory thermometer was found and used rectally. Her temperature then was 64.4° F.—far below the point generally considered fatal.

When this medically fascinating news was flashed around the hospital, doctors crowded into the emergency ward to see still-frozen Johnny. Some of them knew her of old; she was a pretty tough girl, even for Chicago’s South Side. Only last week she was charged with assault for almost cutting her husband’s ear off.

The doctors set the room temperature at 68° to thaw her out. They injected plasma for shock. Dr. Laufman gave her 200 milligrams of cortisone. “I still don’t know if it did any good,” he says, “but her temperature started to rise at a sharp rate.” At 3 :30 p.m. it was 77°, at 8 p.m. 86°, and her pulse and respiration were almost normal. Johnny woke up, opened her eyes and said: “I’m cold.”

Quick Freeze. Next morning she was close to normal. Her temperature had leveled off at about 101°, she could see perfectly well with eyes that had been frozen hard 24 hours before. “She has feeling in all her limbs,” Dr. Laufman says wonderingly. She may have to lose only the tips of her fingers, if even that. This is not like the frostbite cases you’ve read about in Korea. It is not frostbite, but a frozen state of animation. I don’t know what to call it but a deep freeze.”

If Johnny recovers fully, she will star in medical history. The Nazis, who chilled men & women deliberately, found that their victims died when their temperatures had fallen into the 80s and 70s. For some unknown reason, Johnny’s heart managed to keep beating slowly. If her frozen limbs escape amputation, it may be because they were frozen quickly by Chicago’s fierce cold. When tissues freeze slowly, large ice crystals form in the cells and kill them by puncturing their walls. In quick-frozen tissues (as in quick-frozen foods), the crystals do not get large enough to do the same damage.

Dr. Laufman suspects that alcohol may have had something to do with Johnny’s stubborn survival. She had been drinking heavily. He does not think that the alcohol acted like anti-freeze in an auto radiator, but he believes it may have had some effect.