Medicine: Hard Heart

Last week a rare medical marvel named Regina Bramy died in San Francisco and Drs. Harold Brunn & Albert Lincoln Brown finally completed her case history.

Five years ago Mrs. Bramy. wife of a dress peddler, mother of four, went to Dr. Brown, complaining of pain in her chest. He decided that a general infection had inflamed the thin sac called the pericardium which contains the heart and caused it to adhere to Mrs. Bramy’s breast bone. Surgeon Brown excised a section of the woman’s sternum and ribs together with enough rib gristle to enable him to reach into her chest and free the pericardium from its adhesions. At the same time he removed a tiny bit of pericardial tissue. As he suspected, that wall of Mrs. Bramy’s heart was beginning to turn to stone.

For three years Mrs. Bramy was able to look after her family. Then, to relieve her hardening heart, Surgeons Brunn & Brown were obliged to remove a rigid 2-by-3 in. section from her calcifying pericardium. That type of operation was rare. Rarer was the patient’s survival in comfort for another two years.

Fortnight ago, in an operation whose consequences were pneumonia and death last week. Surgeons Brunn & Brown removed still more of the stone wall around Mrs. Bramy’s heart. At her autopsy the remainder of her pericardium was found to be solid marble, ⅛ to ½ in. thick.