Medicine: Fatal Gases

The septuagenarian’s silky grey beard, spread over his hospital blanket, jerked each time he gasped the oxygen which an electric motor blew upon his face. Another midnight passed, and attendants of Brooklyn’s Jewish Hospital left Aaron Handler, dying of heart disease, alone for a while. Then a dull boom from his room recalled nurses and internes on a dead run. They found Aaron Handler’s beard a shriveling, stinking torch fanned by the breeze of oxygen. Whether the electric pump emitted a combustive spark, or whether his beard generated a spark by rubbing against the woolen blanket will never be known. Aaron Handler died silently of burns, shock and heart failure.

Commented Dr. Alvan Leroy Barach, Manhattan pneumotherapist who is largely responsible for the use of oxygen to treat weak hearts (TIME, April 6, 1931): “Accidents from fire in oxygen tents or in oxygen rooms are extremely rare. When they do occur, they are caused by some reckless action on the part of the patient, such as lighting cigarets. This man must have lit a cigaret. The theory that a spark might have flown from the motor over to the oxygen tent is untenable.”

In another section of Brooklyn last week another useful gas manifested its deadly potentialities. Carbon dioxide, condensed to dry ice, was used to refrigerate a cargo of cherries shipped from Buffalo to Brooklyn. Not reflecting that dry ice evaporates to carbon dioxide gas again, that carbon dioxide in an unventilated room displaces oxygen without which no man can live, and that it is therefore a modern occupational hazard, two Brooklyn stevedores descended into the ship’s hold to unload cases of cherries. They had time only to cry alarm before they dropped unconscious. Three other stevedores who went to the rescue also suffocated. All five were dead before they could be lifted to fresh air.